It’s not just about the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. The proposed alternative to pharmaceutical patents starts from the fact that the big pharmaceutical companies officially admit they only spend 15% of their revenues on research, to suggest that the governments could take 20% of what they currently spend on drugs (which is a lot of money!) and allocate it to pharmaceutical research, with the results free to anyone. However, the Pirate Party is the only political party to have asserted that all kind of patents have to be abolished, not only the pharmaceutical patents and the software patents!
In the same way, the Pirate Party opposes patents — especially in software, but also in other areas.
“All patents, at their base, are innovation inhibitors,” he maintains. “Patents delayed the industrial revolution by thirty years. They delayed the advent of the North American avionics industry by another thirty years, until the first world war broke out, and the US government confiscated the patents. It delayed radio for five years.” Today, he suggests, advances in electric cars and eco-friendly infrastructure are similarly blocked by patents.
Call him Dr. No. Locked in a bitter dispute over how he can use the fruits of his research, Bob Shafer is asking the same question the courts are now grappling with: Just what can be patented, anyway?
Our genes might be practically open to discovery, there’s very little physically I can do to prevent you from acquiring my genes and unraveling my genetic code. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be disturbing or unethical if you did this. The knowledge you could get about me, and use against me, is just too potentially disruptive to decide that we are not somehow each custodians, and maybe even more properly guardians, of our individual genetic data.
At the same time, the genome we share cannot be cordoned off. To the degree that our genetic information is mostly the same, we should all have access to it. No one should be able to claim that if we want to peek around, learn some more, and do some studies on this common genetic code, we somehow have to pay for this. Our “common genetic heritage” is, I argue, an actual commons like the sky, sunlight, or international waters. We should treat it as such.
Last night the House voted overwhelmingly to establish new U.S. policy that will oppose any global climate change treaty that weakens the IP rights of American “green technology.”
Staggering. Sickening. Suicidal. (Via Against Monopoly.)
Intellectual “property” (IP) is a sleeper issue. It seems uncontroversial: Someone invents or writes something and therefore owns it. What could be plainer? But IP contains the power to destroy liberty.
IP isn’t merely about rock bands preventing kids from sharing MP3s over the Internet. (See “Weird Al” Yankovic’s musical commentary, “Don’t Download This Song,” here.) It’s about crusty incumbent firms trying to preserve market share by stifling competition, domestically and in the developing world.
We’ve discussed the difference between “invention” (doing something new) and “innovation” (finding a new successful market) before, and it’s resulted in some long and occasionally contentious discussions. Fred Wilson put up a post recently where he looked at a series of product “success” stories, and tried to figure out what was the key to success. In each one, he noted that the product enabled people to do stuff in a different way — but one of the key findings, was that they all had something else in common: being drop dead simple, leading to much greater adoption
Since the launch of the Wii, Nintendo has been the subject of no fewer than 15 patent-related lawsuits. While many of those suits are still winding their way through the courts, Nintendo on Thursday issued a statement touting victory over Guardian Media Technologies in one of the more recent patent suits.
Summary: Both independent people and businesses call for the end of illegal procurement deals with Microsoft
YESTERDAY WE published an essay that explains how Microsoft built an ecosystem that rejects anything but Microsoft (and/or its ecosystem). Such is the case in most countries, but the level of this corruption (e.g. illegal procurement) depends on the country. The press gave a lot of coverage to the Switzerland example, but there is actually more than one story over there. Here is an update about the first:
The Swiss Open Systems User Group and the canton of Berne treasurer’s office have reached a rapprochement. The open source advocacy group had criticised the fact that a contract for revamping the canton’s 14,000 workstations was awarded to Microsoft without a tendering process. Although the canton is insisting that the contract should stand, the Swiss Open Systems User Group has decided not to pursue the case in the courts.
This is separate from another case in Switzerland, namely:
In a similar case, also in Switzerland, a group of open source companies including Red Hat, Univention and Collax recently brought an action against the Swiss Federal Office for Buildings and Logistics (BBL).
More on the latter situation in Switzerland can be found in our prior posts:
The UK is still a laggard at open source, even though the recession has increased pressure for its adoption, according to speakers at a London conference.
“I could go to Mali, and Mali would probably have a better adoption of open source than the UK,” said Matt Asay, marketing vice president at Alfresco and open source blogger at CNet. “The UK tends to be a laggard compared to just about every other country on the planet.”
The UK government’s decision to promote open source in public sector IT won kudos, but was behind countries like the Netherlands, which has had a strong public sector IT policy for two years now, according to Jan Wildeboer, open source evangelist at Red Hat.
More information on the situation in the UK may be found in previous posts that include:
With increased awareness comes increased public support. People stand up and demand software that respects their wallets, if not their freedom and regional independence too. Fewer people are made conscious of that latter factor. The BBC has a decent documentary (a 3-hour show titled “The Trap”) about people’s inability to grasp the real meaning of freedom. Without losing it, people cannot properly understand it and instead they are told about freedom of choice (limited choice) or freedom as in “no cost”. █
“Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer [...] I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I’m an American; I believe in the American way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don’t think we’ve done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat.”
–Jim Allchin, President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft
I’m not a .net developer, I don’t need this. The second statement I though was very presumptuous (to say the least). Mono is their “gift to the world” and positioned to be the leading choice for Linux application developers? I’m not a developer, and (laughing) I’m not a gift to planet earth (although I like to think I am at times), but I suspect these statements are somewhat boasting in nature? However, personal thought aside. Score 1 for the “Nos”, I’m not a .net developer, nor a Linux developer, so I don’t need this.
The force which pushes the hardest for more and more of Mono in Ubuntu is currently a Ubuntu MOTU and Debian packager. The argument here is not over the inclusion of Mono; it’s its inclusion by default. What is this urge to spread Mono further and more widely? Mono helps Microsoft because there is factual evidence to show this [1, 2, 3]. As Oiaohm puts it, “Mono cannot run all .NET applications due to native .NET applications able to do native calls. So Mono has to run in Wine to support some applications. Nice way to create something you can demo as failing on Linux really.” █
“As many of you may know, we’ve actually kind of broadened the product portfolio of Visual Studio, targeting all the way from the low end with students and hobbyists, kind of competitive in that Linux space, making sure that every developer has a copy of .NET and is trained in writing .NET solutions. [...] I think it will really help us in our competition with open source.”
“Analysts sell out – that’s their business model… But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with.”
Summary: Forrester’s FOSS-hostile survey leaves many questions unanswered
LIKE ALL businesses, Forrester is being paid by clients for a service, e.g. in order to support some of their claims. It’s better if an argument comes from a supposedly “expert” and/or “independent” source, according to Microsoft[PDF]. As we mentioned some days ago, Forrester was previously paid by Microsoft to publicly smear GNU/Linux. Forrester analysts make a living this way. Right now they are attacking Free software using the “security” myth and Jack Wallen rightly doesn’t buy it. He raises some of the typical concerns — loopholes for well-designed deception. These are textbook examples.
Let me break it down for you. In two reports done by Forrester (”The State of SMB Software: 2009 and “The State of Enterprise Software: 2009.”) of the 2,227 people polled…
[....]
I would like to ask both Forrester and those polled a few questions myself. To Forrester I would ask you:
1. “Who is funding these surveys?”
2. “Do you know anything enough about open source yourself to actually create a fair poll?
3. What’s with the large change between enterprise and SMB in the “very concerned” category?
To those polled I would like to ask:
1. “Have you ever tried open source software?”
2. “How’s the security of your closed-source apps working out for you?”
Another concern, which Wallen leaves out unfortunately, is the bias of the studied population. It is being selected rather than voluntarily invited. Microsoft was previously caught commissioning IDC to ask Microsoft customers about GNU/Linux and then pretend that their views are representative of the population as a whole (see the 5-part Analysts Cartel series [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] as well as some other examples of corrupted analysts like IDC and Gartner getting exposed [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]). Wallen shrewdly points out that push-polling could easily be applied here. Microsoft does this all the time, e.g. against Google and in favour of the patent deal with Novell. The Microsoft-corrupted ISO did the same thing after verysheercorruption had led to formal complaints from several national bodies.
Whether Microsoft directly sponsored this latest survey from Forrester, it may be extremely hard to tell. Microsoft need not even pay for it directly if it is treated as a favour for which a reward will be granted at a later date. We have concrete examples of that. These are different degrees of bribery and the level of depth makes it profoundly harder to find the culprit. It’s analogous to money laundering and it may related to the previous post about SCO receiving funds despite having no business prospects.
Citrix, which also owns Xen, the virtualization company, has long-standing links with Microsoft such that open source advocates routinely think of it as being in Microsoft’s orbit. (The illustration above, from Bob Warfield’s Smoothspan blog, illustrates this keiretsu concept in terms of cloud computing.)
The Citrix-Vyatta link, discussed here by Dan Kusnetsky (who also has the good sense to partner with our own Paula Rooney) is a second-order link. That is, Microsoft links to Citrix links to Vyatta. (A litle like Bacon’s own relation to Hitler, as seen on The Daily Show.)
This time, as always, it is highly important to follow the money. █
“They [Microsoft] have the deepest of pockets, unlimited ambition, and they are willing to lose money for years and years just to make sure that you don’t make any money, either. And they are mean, REALLY mean.”
Summary: The SCO saga is not over yet, as further delays are caused by mysterious funding
A few days ago we warned that groups with connections to Microsoft were getting close to SCO just before liquidation seemed unstoppable and imminent. Some time yesterday we began finding articles which confirm not a transaction being made but a deal being signed in the 90th minute. SJVN writes:
We don’t know who’s behind this latest SCO buyout craziness, but it seems a safe bet that at the bottom of it all we’ll find friends of Microsoft. There’s simply no sane business reason to keep SCO’s anti-Linux litigation in play except to spread a little anti-Linux FUD, and Microsoft is the only company that has any real interest in seeing that happen.
Immediately before the crucial liquidation hearing in the bankruptcy court, SCO CEO Darl McBride signed an agreement with a company by the name of Gulf Capital Partners, backed by well-known investor Stephen Norris. Caught out by the surprise development, all parties have agreed to postpone the liquidation hearing until the 16th or the 27th of July.
So, the bottom line of the day is that the proposed sale to Gulf-Cap-whatever-their-name-really-turns-out-to-be (see previous article) will have a hearing on July 16, as Webster earlier reported. So we will no doubt get to see the proposed agreement filed, and then objections, the usual song and dance. So, bottom line? Delay, delay, delay. It’s too bad SCO can’t package it up and sell delay. They’d make a fortune. It is what they are best at, I’d say.
As it stands, everything remains up in the air — the proposed sale is by no means final, and if it is like any of the others, is likely nothing more than a delaying tactic. If the judge has any sense about him, when and if this deal falls through like all the rest, he’ll wake up and finally start sanctioning SCO for treating the Bankruptcy Code like kindling. If it falls through by next month’s hearing, SCO will need a miracle even Satan couldn’t help them get to avoid conversion into a Chapter 7 — once the Chapter 7 trustee gets his hands on them, they’ll find themselves sold off faster than $5 Ferraris. By the time it finally happens, that champagne we all put away in 2002 will be just about right.
According to this, SCO is not guaranteed an extended lifetime. Better answers will have arrived by the end of this month however. █
“[Microsoft's] Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”
“Now [Novell is] little better than a branch of Microsoft”
–LinuxToday Managing Editor
Summary: Novell is poaching Free GNU/Linux users, not Windows users
NOVELL’S actions speak louder than its words, which are pretty clear too. Novell tries to replace GNU/Linux with Microsoft patent coupons and here is the latest evidence.
Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions is now a Novell Authorized Training Partner in North America. The move comes as Novell strives to migrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to Novell SUSE Linux.
This article is about Novell trying to steal Red Hat customers rather than Microsoft customers. The methods are nasty. “People that use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us,” said Steve Ballmer. Since when is Mr. Ballmer Novell’s spokesperson? Prior to this remark he praised Novell. See the video at the bottom. █
Amit Mital, the corporate VP who oversees Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, will take over Parthasarathy’s job.
Unlimited Potential Group is the anti-GNU/Linux division/program at Microsoft, as noted repeatedly before [1, 2, 3, 4]. Nice to know it all stays in the family. █
“Under NO circumstances lose against Linux before ensuring we have used this program actively and in a smart way.”
Dirty little secret documented in buried court exhibits
Summary: While IBM and Microsoft were still officially “partners” on OS/2, Microsoft got someone to write a “bad app” to crash on OS/2. Steve Ballmer then took this “bad app” on the road to demonstrate that OS/2 was unstable. This, for an executive of the world’s “most innovative” software company, is a new low because he knew what he was doing.
THE following is a true ‘smoking gun’. It shows that Microsoft deliberately included a “bad app” so as to sabotage the OS/2 demonstrations. They all knew about it and apparently approved it, as no-one objected. Among those in circulation: Bill Gates, Paul Maritz, and Jim Allchin.
For today’s stories we bring together two court exhibits, which are available in full as text in Appendix A & B.
Here is a portion from Exhibit px_0860 (1991)[PDF]. Cameron Myhrvold, the brother of Microsoft's patent troll, is being sent a message that shows Bill Gates freaking out because OS/2 is better than Windows. Gates writes:
This report highlights our failure to get our message out.
It praises Os/2 2.0 endlessly using the charts from the IBM
white papers. For example the chart showing windows giving you
only 506k of memory and Os/2 giving you 620k.
It praises the better windows than windows capability – including
“one of the best attributes of windows applications run within
Os/2 is the superior system intgrity. Should an application crash you
can just closre the session and continue. No need to close down and
restart. Performance is helped by Os/2 preemptive multitasking and
the ability to share I/o. At the roll out bash in New York IBM
demonstated the same windows application running on a Windows
machine and on an Os/2 machine. Certainly there is no performance
trade off for the greater stability offered by Os/2 2.0″
In a section called Os/2 does it better he goes on to say:
As an integrating enviroment Os/2 provides some nice enhancements
over plain windows. First Os/2 2 can run both windows 2 and windows 3
applications at the same time.
Later we read:
Os/2 2 is undoubtedly a splendid integration environment. Even with the
early code wve see it does indeed run dos better than doas, windows
better than windows and so on. With the new pricing it is difficult
to think of a reason for not using Os/2 at the integrating environment.
If you can get a better environment for the same amount of money as
windows wouldnt you make the switch other factors such as hardware cost
being equal?
He reviews our strategy in a fairly negative way.
I am sure I will get back some message about how steve will see these
people and it will all be better. It wont be better. No one is taking
responsibility for getting our message out broadly. Yes someone
should call mike and sicuss this exact points but the customers will
read what he has written. We should recognize we are loving this battle
and we need a lot mor creativity to get on top of it.
Now, check out what Steve Ballmer is up to (with all those in management as witnesses, including Brad Silverberg, Paul Maritz, and Jim Allchin):
SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry
analysts and business press this week to give our systems
strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and
multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a
performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that
corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a
very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS
executives throughout the next month so we hit all the
publications and analysts.
What is this “bad app”? It already says quite clearly that it “corrupted other applications and crashed the system.” Was it designed to achieve this? Let’s find out. Further down it says:
4. The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had
the intended effect–to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to
this demo and were often surprised to our favor.
That’s pretty clear. The whole exhibit is well worth reading. See for example how Microsoft handles the press following the FUD attack, including people like “Ed Bott”, whom we all know these days for being in Microsoft's pocket.
Business Press:
Good meetings with Paul Carroll, Wall Street Journal, Evan
Schwartz, Business Week, and John Marcoff, New York Times.
Paul had several misconceptions that IBM had planted. He said
that he is getting back into daily writing and appreciated the
update. Evan is interested in spinning out the scenarios for
the next ten years of the PC industry for their big story. He
asked about Novell, IBM, object technology–what does it mean
really. Marcoff had been to Boca–he said that it was really
“disorganized” down there. He asked about the meeting between
Scully and BillG–Steve said it was of no consequence. Marcoff
said the industry strategy seems to be to “get Microsoft.” He
said he buys the OS/2 scenario that Steve gave. He was curious
if Microsoft and IBM are now “enemies.” Steve said no, but we
truly compete and we don’t see much chance of change in
current situation.
Magazines:
PC Week was lengthy. Paul Sherer asks very good questions
about the strategy. Sam Whitmore was somewhat hostile. He
demanded to know if he could talk to BillG about the
Scully/BillG meeting and did not seem to believe Steve about
the discussion the two had. PC Week is doing one story that
will be inside the magazine. (The cover will have a scoop on
Windows Word 2.0, a MS/Great Plains deal, the Microsoft
analyst meeting). PC Week will continue to be skeptical of
Microsoft.
Computerworld was a good meeting. Paul Gillan and Tish asked
the expected questions. Paul reiterated that he needs to get
out to Microsoft in the next year to get a complete update.
Infoworld. A good meeting, lots of editors were there.
Questions were on our product strategy, geopolitical issues,
how can Microsoft think it will beat IBM. They are doing a
story for next week.
CRN. They were briefed over the phone and will do a story,
focused on Windows NT, and LAN Manager for NT.
PC Computing. Good turnout from the editorial staff. Dale
LeWallen will keep the staff straight on technical matters.
The new executive editor, Ed Bott, was highly interested in
our product plans and we can work with them for good coverage
on Windows 3.1 and Windows NT.
As we stated earlier, it remains to be shows that the “bad app” was intentionally designed to be malicious. Proof of this can be found in Exhibit px_0797 (1991)[PDF]. Here is the complementary ‘smoking gun’:
| > From ericfo Thu Jun 27 09:27:07 1991
| To: paulma
| Subject: Re: One Bad App
| Date: Thu Jun 27 09:28:30 1991
|
| I tested on 1.21, 1.3 and 2.0 and it hangs all systems equally well…
|
| | > From paulma Thu Jun 27 07:30:47 1991
| | To: ericfo
| | Subject: One Bad App
| | Date: Thu Jun 27 07:30:08 1991
| |
| | OK, thx. I will come around.
| |
| | > From ericfo Wed Jun 26 19:59:16 1991
| | To: paulma
| | Subject: One Bad App
| | Date: Wed Jun 26 20:02:30 1991
| |
| | I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically).
| |
| | You can take a look at it anytime, just let me know…
| |
| | Eric
| |
|
Notice who is being told that the “bad app” was being built? Paul Maritz, the current CEO of VMware. What is shown above is criminal bevaviour, but none of those involved is behind bars.
The use of this “bad app” is covered in that previous Steve Ballmer and OS/2 memo. This is huge, as it shows that they went out and designed an application specifically to crash on OS/2 and then Steve Ballmer went on the road and demonstrated OS/2 with it, explicitly knowing what it was designed to achieve.
“This is depressing reading,” remarks one of our readers. “Add those bits to the Ballmer FUDs OS/2wiki articles. Put the emails in order of conversation by date. Do check the originals for accuracy. And the DOJ never used this stuff. Someone must of told them to go easy.”
What can we deduce from this incident about contemporary events? Microsoft is trying to make ODF look bad by fragmenting it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. That in its own right has a similar effect; we just don’t have the memos to prove anything intentional. █
Appendix A: Comes vs. Microsoft – exhibit px_0860, as text
