12.12.09
Posted in Apple, Asia, Law, Microsoft, Mono, Patents, TomTom at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patent news from the United States, Europe, and a middle-eastern nation
Nokia and Apple are two patent monsters that we have warned about for years. They are now clashing with one another, so it’s mutual and counter-productive.
Responding to a lawsuit brought against the company by Nokia, Apple® today filed a countersuit claiming that Nokia is infringing 13 Apple patents.
Apple’s response is covered in many news sites [1, 2, 3] and even the Web site of Miguel de Icaza, who refused the see the writings on the wall when Microsoft sued TomTom (and before the FSF made its famous statement regarding Mono).
Over in the UK, the government is doing something rather bizarre with patents:
On the assumption that this is not a practical joke, it now seems that the British government is set to tax the fruits of research and development in order to fund … research and development. What a wonderful incentive to invest, particularly when other countries are encouraging R&D by doing the exact opposite. Merpel says, don’t worry: Britain’s best tax brains will soon find ways of showing that the income in question isn’t derived from patents at all, and the government’s coffers will be none the fuller.
See the comment from Sun’s Simon Phipps (a Brit).
Another Brit, Glyn Moody, has found even more bizarre stuff:
Objectivists: ‘All Property is Intellectual Property’
[...]
In other words, if you take a principled approach to IP, you endorse a system that condemns society to stagnation and death. So most proponents, like Rand, realizing this, start making ad hoc, unprincipled, utilitarian exceptions to avoid the most obvious, harsh consequences of a principled implementation of their confused IP ideas.
“Greed knows no bounds,” claimed Microsoft some years ago. It was referring to lawyer fees.
Over in Israel too, the threat of software patents is now looming.
As I have explained in this blog in earlier articles, I consider the copyright double protection idea is problematic since copyright protects the embodiment of the idea and not the idea itself. Why shouldn’t a software invention be protectable against reengineering? Is a 70 year protection against copying of any value in a field where a generation is usually 2 years? Considering software not technical is ridiculous. software is rightly considered an engineering discipline. Since algorithms can be hard-wired into chips or by a machine with valves, the concept of software being different from hardware is somewhat arbitrary. Nevertheless, Lord Justice Jacobs has presented powerful arguments as to why software patents are not in the interest of promoting progress and there is a large open-source community.
Abolishers of software patents (led by the FSF’s Ciarán O’Riordan) have already built this resource page about the subject.
The Israeli Patent Office (IPO) has launched a consultation on whether or not to allow software patents, with a February 2010 deadline. I’ve put the details at the end of this post, but first some background.
* The IPO consistently rejects software patents and business method patents. Examples:
o The 2005 rejection of the 142049 website patent
o The September 2006 rejection of the 131733 sales coupons patent
* Patent Attorney Ehud Hausman, with the support of international pro-swpat lobby group AIPPI, has been trying since 2007 to change this.
* He claimed in May 2008 to have partly convinced the IPO to grant software patents (but no change on business method patents). I’ve no third-party confirmation of this.
Who is funding these lobbyists? They are working for their own wallets. █
“Plager said he regretted the unintended consequences of the decisions in State Street Bank and AT&T. Those rulings led to a flood of applications for software and business method patents, he noted. If we “rethink the breadth of patentable subject matter,” he said, we should ask whether these categories should be excluded from patent protection.” —US. Senior Judge S. Jay Plager, speaking at a symposium at George Mason University
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12.11.09
Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNU/Linux, Law, Microsoft, Patents, TomTom at 5:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The nastiness of patents puts itself up on display and herein we share the truth about this ill system, based on the latest news alone
THIS is a collection of news items that affect Free software by means of law.
Microsoft and Rambus Ambushed the Industry
Microsoft’s de facto PR machine is working to create another patent scare. Mary Jo Foley’s role was mentioned earlier and Ina Fried follows with promotion of exFAT patents.
The File Allocation Table (FAT) format is also licensed out by Microsoft, although its patents there have been the subject of contention, particularly since many distributions of Linux include the FAT formats.
This is also covered by the Microsoft bunch at Ars Technica (Emil) and other Microsoft reporters.
In February 2009, news broke that Microsoft had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom, alleging that the device maker’s products, including some that are Linux-based, infringe on patents related to Microsoft’s FAT32 filesystem. In March 2009, Microsoft and TomTom settled their controversial patent dispute, TomTom licensed the patents from Microsoft, and stated its intent to remove from its Linux kernel the code that is covered by the patents.
We have covered the TomTom case very extensively and also explained why Microsoft had ambushed the market with FAT. Microsoft is not alone though.
Rambus used submarine patents (or an ambush) in order to penalise all of its competitors [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Rambus was brought to court over this type of abuse and right now it is trying to escape punishment in Europe.
The American memory chip designer has been fighting allegations that it intentionally concealed that it had patents and patent applications connected to DRAM chips, which later became an industry standard. It’s accused of charging abusive licensing rates for the technology once its “patent ambush” was sprung.
In an hypothetical industry that prioritises progress, Rambus and Microsoft deserve to have the patents in question rubbished and all royalties previously paid to them refunded over time. If the patent system becomes a tool of deception, then The Christian Science Monitor is probably right and the patent system (including USPTO) deserves to be rubbished along with all those patents. To quote Richard Stallman (regarding EPO earlier this year [1, 2] ): “The European Patent Office is a corrupt, malicious organisation which should not exist.” Stallman argues that if it stands in our way, then we should “get rid of it too.”
RPX: Return of the Uber-Patent Harvester
We previously wrote about RPX in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. In short, it’s a useless behemoth that only accumulates patents and then offers “protection”. Georg Greve has just described RPX rather politely by writing “When your business plan is a euphemism for “protection racket”…”
Greve is the founder of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and he links to what he describes as a “Good article on the reality of software patents.”
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is well known for the venture capital it brought to great innovations involving computers, health and energy. One of its latest startups is based on an entrepreneurial idea that may or may not be great but is very interesting: helping companies hand over money for mostly bogus legal claims involving patents.
This particular startup, RPX, doesn’t describe itself that way. In fact, it makes a good case that its goal is to help companies, many of them in the tech industry, make the best of the bad situation that is the U.S. patent system. The fact that patent holders and lawyers will end up with money they don’t deserve reflects nothing about RPX but a lot about a system filled with rot.
If you think patents protect plucky innovators and their groundbreaking inventions, you haven’t been paying attention. Patents have evolved into an extortion scheme that hurts real inventors far more than it helps them.
Of course it does. Patents are about protecting monopolies, not protecting innovation. It’s a protectionist measure where the “protected” subject is revenue, not science. It is about investors, not inventors.
There is this new transcript of Richard Stallman on software patents:
The Danger of Software Patents
This is the transcript of a talk presented by Richard M. Stallman on 8 October 2009 at Victoria University of Wellington.
There are also videos of previous Stallman talks which cover the same subject.
Patents Versus Survival
On a couple of occasions earlier this week we wrote about the harms caused to the environment by patents. Check out this new report:
Preservation of IP: One of Many Goals in Copenhagen
[...]
The Chamber’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) has been front and center in this debate, and our position is clear: if governments are serious about addressing climate change, and all agree that new technologies are a vital part of the answer, then IP laws and rights need to be protected in any Copenhagen agreement. Indeed, in our view, a Copenhagen Summit with NO mention of IP at all is a successful conclusion. Current international laws and norms are working, and need to be preserved.
To which Glyn Moody responds with:
Got that? Stuff the environment, we’ve got to protect the *important* things in life, like intellectual monopolies…
Indeed. Here is a touching report on the subject. █
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10.11.09
Posted in Apple, Bill Gates, Deception, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents, TomTom at 10:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple’s software patents harm/distract the Web and Linux; Microsoft’s software patents harm/distract Linux; The Gates Foundation makes more investments in patents
EARLIER THIS year we wrote about Apple's abuse of the Web using software patents (Apple also threatened to sue over Linux devices). What’s troubling is that both Apple and Microsoft have a chair at the HTML Working Group (W3C) and Apple can be quite a bit of a bully, which now leads the W3C to modifying APIs.
The W3C has spent the last three months poring over Apple’s patent on remote updating, and the web standards organization thinks the patent can be avoided by careful wording and tweaking a couple of APIs.
Software should not be patentable in the first place and the above is a waste of the W3C’s time. What is Apple trying to ‘protect’ anyway? It also publicly attacked Ogg.
NewsWeek has this new report which targets the hype behind the iPhone and the reality behind developing for Apple [via].
Seeking fortune and fame, entrepreneurs rushed to create programs for Apple’s App Store. That’s not always what they found.
So basically, there may be no more money contributing to Apple’s ecosystem than there is in helping Free(dom) software. It was similar with Palm OS.
Moving on to some other software patents, our reader Yuhong Bao claims that Microsoft’s loadable module [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], which was originally a GPL violation, completely hid this important item of news about the workaround for Microsoft’s FAT LFN patent. From the summary:
Only hours after Microsoft’s Hyper-V Linux patch, tridge submitted a revised workaround patch for MS’s FAT LFN patents. If you don’t remember, the original patch was in response to MS suing TomTom over these patents. This revised version provides better compatiblity, particularly with Windows 98, portable MP3 players, as well as mtools.
More and more people are becoming uncomfortable with the patent system, which a writer at Information Week is now denouncing. His complaint is summarised as follows:
Let’s remember the original purpose of the patent system: to encourage innovation and its broader benefits, not to make people rich.
As Gates and Microsoft grow closer to bankers, worth noticing is this item in the news about JPMorgan and the Gates Foundation hooking up. The Gates Foundation also does more of its notorious investments in patents (i.e. monopolies).
The Gates Foundation funding is for a global decision facility for patents and how they impact on innovation.
The Gates Foundation also invests heavily in patents on life, patents on agriculture (GM crops/foods), and Gates himself started a patent-hoarding firm.
This relates rather nicely to what we wrote this morning about Mirosoft and swine flu. The following segment of a talk provides more insight into the real impact of patents. Patents are not what people are led to believe they are. █
“While I recognize the great value and importance of prescription drugs and strongly support a continued U.S. focus on pharmaceutical research and development, our nation’s seniors cannot be asked to subsidize the drug costs of other wealthy industrialized nations any longer.”
–Michael K. Simpson
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09.11.09
Posted in GNU/Linux, Humour, Kernel, Microsoft, Patents, TomTom at 3:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A cartoon on what’s being done at Microsoft (click image for the full sequence)
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08.31.09
Posted in Formats, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Patents, Standard, TomTom at 3:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“[W]e should take the lead in establishing a common approach to UI and to interoperability (of which OLE is only a part). Our efforts to date are focussed too much on our own apps, and only incidentally on the rest of the industry. We want to own these standards, so we should not participate in standards groups. Rather, we should call ‘to me’ to the industry and set a standard that works now and is for everyone’s benefit. We are large enough that this can work.”
–Microsoft [PDF]
Summary: Bits of analysis of Microsoft’s mistakes on Web and document standards
IT IS no secret that Microsoft dislikes open standards; they are not good for the shareholders. The integrity of the company often comes later than short-term gain, so it is not a wise strategy, either. According to this gem, it has just become apparent that OOXML is nothing more than a reactionary move caused by the advent of ODF. It was known all along but there is new compelling evidence to support such an argument.
James D. Mason says:
I spent 22 years as the chairman of what is now ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. SC34 is the committee that standardized SGML in the 1980s and now is responsible for both ODF, supported by many open-source products, and OOXML, the XML released by Microsoft in response to ODF. Neither ODF nor OOXML has anything to do with ODA/ODIF, which have been dormant since the turn of the current century but were still under development in the 1990s in a committee that was parallel to the one that became SC34.
Our past analysis: OOXML is a response. Thank you very much for the confirmation. Stronger language from Mason found in this article.
Thanks to Andre for finding this out. In his country, Germany, Microsoft has been using Fraunhofer essentially as a shill for OOXML. In light of the very latest deception form Fraunhofer, Jones wrote at Groklaw (News Picks):
ODF is totally open to the world. So where might the bottleneck be found, class? Did you really, really think that Microsoft intended there to be real interoperability? Some of us recall very well what happened in Germany in the OOXML approval process and the role this institute played. Remember their words, as translated from the German by a Groklaw volunteer? –
“The beginning standardization procedure of Office Open XML as an ISO standard will lead to a technological development of both standards – Office Open XML and ODF 1.0. The constructive comments that have been made alongside the DIN approval from leading experts guide the way in direction of interoperability” says the head of the department e-Government at Fraunhofer FOKUS and head of the DIN work group translation of document formats. “We at Fraunhofer FOKUS e-government-lab will support the procedure effectively and accompany our lab-partner Microsoft as a member of ECMA International with our know-how in implementing our recommendations.”
In relation to the patent assault on Free software, Jones later used the OOXML saga as an example too, remarking that it proves Microsoft never wanted to interoperate. “Like Microsoft will run right out and do that [give up on patent threats]“, she wrote, “because it just spent a fortune building up a patent portfolio, and it doesn’t plan on using them against Linux. Dream on. It’s not about hating any company, but there is enough water under the bridge to be able to predict that Microsoft probably will use those patents aggressively, as they already did in the TomTom case, and as they do in FUDly ways already. And what makes anyone think Microsoft wishes to interoperate, after watching the OOXML saga? Best to be realistic about Microsoft. The Linux Foundation may feel it has to say stuff like that, but I don’t.”
Microsoft has a long history of fighting against standards rather than accepting that they are needed. Eventually, inevitably, Microsoft joined ODF but did so poorly in a way that may only harm ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. And now it may do the same to HTML5. As CNET puts it:
The World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML Working Group had been led by IBM’s Sam Ruby and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson. Wilson has stepped down and is being replaced by two others, Paul Cotton, who manages Microsoft’s Web services standards team, and Maciej Stachowiak, who manages Apple’s WebKit WebApps team, according to an e-mail announcement by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee.
Why are freedom-hostile companies put in charge of the W3C HTML Working Group? We asked that question a couple of days ago, mystified.
“Jimmy the Geek” from Linux Today writes:
About 4 years ago. I could see that Vista was going to kill any momentum that Microsoft had picked up from XP and I was right. I even called the layoffs happening this year.
Sadly some of my friends are caught up in the whole MS layoff situation, which sucks.
My prediction for the next 5 years? Microsoft is going to do a Novell. They are going to try to keep doing what they have always done, despite losing more and more and more market, until in the end they are forced to adopt open source as their core OS.
Well, until then, Microsoft will suffer financially, quarter after quarter. █
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08.07.09
Posted in Courtroom, GNU/Linux, IBM, Law, Microsoft, Novell, SCO, TomTom, UNIX at 10:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
–Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO
Summary: As the SCO lawsuit falls deeper into oblivion, it is worth relating this to existing new lawsuits (TomTom and Melco, both settled)
YESTERDAY we came across this curious comment about Microsoft, which said: “if/when their revenue get down far enough… i will expect to see more lawsuits being initiated by MS…. when that start to happen.. MS will have officially “jumped the shark” as they say..“
Based on Larry Goldfarb’s testimony (under oath), it seems safe to say that Microsoft has at the very least funneled money into SCO. Whether Microsoft is also responsible (in part) for initiating the SCO lawsuit is a separate question which we can only speculate about based on circumstantial evidence.
Apart from that, many reporters seem to have not paid attention to Microsoft’s lawsuits against TomTom and against Melco. Both lawsuits were against Linux and they came directly from Microsoft. They came at a stage when SCO was too deep inside a hole, so its ‘FUD factor’ was pretty much annulled. For those who have not been following the SCO saga as of late, in chronological order we have:
With all these scandals behind, it turns out that unXis will not be allowed to buy SCO’s assets after all. From The Register:
A US judge has blocked SCO’s attempt to sell off part of its business in order to fund its ongoing litigation, and appointed a Chapter 11 trustee to oversee the company’s next moves.
SCO was hoping to sell off some of its assets, in order to fund its court battle against IBM and Novell for claimed Linux licenses. For its part, SCO said it was glad not to be pushed into Chapter 7 – full liquidation of the firm.
[...]
Support from Microsoft added to suspicions that the case was designed to put litigation-wary enterprises off using Linux.
The next stage was this appointment of bankruptcy trustee
In the latest development to emerge from the sordid SCO saga, a bankruptcy judge has blocked SCO’s proposed asset sale while denying Novell’s motion to force the company in to Chapter 7 liquidation. In his decision, the judge says that SCO’s hopes of successful litigation against prominent Linux vendors are like Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot.
The SCO Group attempted to stave off liquidation in June by signing a last minute deal with Gulf Capital Partners and a tech firm called unXis. The terms of the agreement, which were finalized only moments before a court hearing, stipulated that SCO would sell its remaining UNIX assets for $2.4 million—a maneuver that could have potentially made it possible for SCO to continue pursuing its bogus litigation against the open source Linux operating system.
Groklaw was the centre of attention regarding this important development.
The judge in the SCO bankruptcy has ruled at last. SCO’s motion to let it sell to unXis is denied. There could be an auction later. The motions to convert to Chapter 7 by IBM, Novell and the US Trustee’s Office are also denied, but alternative relief is granted, and there will be a Chapter 11 trustee appointed. IBM and Novell agreed that a Chapter 11 Trustee was appropriate if he did not convert to Chapter 7, and that is what he has done. That means presumably that SCO management no longer run this show.
There are over 820 comments on that one (which is a rare number by all means) and Heise covered it too, summarising it thusly:
A Chapter 11 trustee has been commissioned to take over the business affairs of the SCO Group, which is threatened by bankruptcy. The trustee will work to guide the company out of the impending bankruptcy according to Chapter 11 of US bankruptcy code, but can also send the company into liquidation according to Chapter 7 and auction individual company assets to the highest bidder. With this order, the Bankruptcy Court in Delaware has removed SCO’s executive board.
Groklaw has a corresponding transcript.
The bankruptcy judge partly bought it, as you know, although he blocked the sale to unXis, questioning their good faith, which is of course why IBM and anyone would care about a sale to them, but for us, who have followed the SCO litigation so closely for six years now and saw SCO’s malice toward Linux with no evidence on the table the public has ever seen, it’s a wonderful laugh. SCO’s “potent claims”, indeed. What IBM and Novell “have done to SCO”. SCO sued them, actually. And Novell prevailed totally against SCO’s allegations of slander of title, which was what SCO sued Novell over, a claim which SCO humiliatingly lost. SCO is not appealing that claim. Just read it for yourself. Page 2 of SCO’s appeal brief lists the issues on appeal, and SCO’s claim of slander of title is not on the list.
Why doesn’t SCO just give up? Is its goal to win this lawsuit or just to prolong the agony and — along with it — the fear, the uncertainty, and the doubt? █
“[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.”
–Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO
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06.30.09
Posted in FSF, GNU/Linux, Law, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, TomTom, Ubuntu at 4:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More opposition to Mono surfaces, detailed explanations offered
AS we pointed out over the weekend [1, 2], the SFLC and FSF are in alignment with Richard Stallman's views on Mono and so are many others. But Bradley Kuhn has just made it more official with a long essay at the SFLC’s Web site. It’s a recommended read.
In an essay last Friday entitled Why free software shouldn’t depend on Mono or C#, RMS argued a key point that I agree with: the software freedom community should minimize its use of programming language infrastructure that comes primarily from anti-software-freedom companies, notwithstanding FaiF (Free as in Freedom) implementations. I’ve been thinking about an extension of that argument: that language infrastructure created in a community process is likely more resilient against attacks from proprietary software companies.
Here is another new perspective:
I think it is interesting that he thinks that it is the “‘best technology’ Linux camp” that is the camp that offers the greatest threat to Microsoft. I can understand why some may think that this is true since this camp is creating flashy and very useful products and features that increase the appeal of Linux. However, mono is not the only tool that the “‘best technology’ Linux camp” has at its disposal. Many view the use of the Qt toolkit as a better alternative, and one that does not have the risk associated with mono. Furthermore, I do not agree with the thought that “‘best technology’ Linux camp” is the one that Microsoft feels most threatened by. I think Microsoft is only threatened by the combination of both camps.
I view mono as a distraction for FOSS developers. Yes, there are some practical advantages in its use, but there are a lot of questions surrounding it. It has the potential of dividing the two mayor camps of Linux contributors. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this controversy.
Since Nokia’s Qt toolkit is mentioned above, here is what KDE developers say on the subject (mind the good comments) and here is what Jack Wallen thinks about Novell’s role.
If Microsoft is threatening patents against .NET, it would seem to me that the Novell/Microsoft relationship didn’t really work out all that well. And now Microsoft is back to their old tricks. And what should the Linux and open source community do about this? Should another deal with Microsoft be made? Is the seamless communication between Linux and Windows worth making a deal with a partner that is only going to turn around and stab you in the back again and again and again?
The Register on the lessons to be learned from TomTom:
Although Stallman frequently speaks about the dangers of software patents on open-source, trust for Microsoft has run particularly thin recently because of the company’s legal attack on TomTom over a FAT patent dispute.
Stallman urged the community to instead distribute and recommend non-C# applications whenever possible to avoid Redmond lawyers from being able to disable major OS functions on a whim.
Microsoft neither retracted nor backed its accusations against Linux. Horacio Gutierrez from Microsoft said about Linux that “there is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed.” He named not even a single one, but Mono is an easy target and also a very unique one.
GNU/Linux users do not want Mono. Well, maybe with the exception of SUSE and Canonical, whose desktop engineering manager comes from Microsoft. In response to the many discussions stemming from Stallman’s essay, Canonical has published yet another statement about Mono.
The Ubuntu Technical Board has been asked for a position statement on the use of C#, specifically the Mono implementation, by applications in Ubuntu.
These applications, as well as the Mono stack, were proposed for inclusion like any other application and underwent the same review process that all new applications and platforms undergo before being accepted into the archive.
With specific regard to the default installed application set, applications have been reviewed and compared against each other on merit and features. These often take place during the Ubuntu Developer Summits, most recently over the default media player.
For those who prefer Ubuntu (like myself), here is a handy new guide: “How to Completely Remove Mono on Ubuntu” █
What Microsoft has
What Microsoft wants
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06.22.09
Posted in Antitrust, ECMA, Finance, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, TomTom at 8:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Mono suffers from an issue of trust — one must trust Microsoft just like TomTom trusted them
NOVELL, like Mono, is impossible to trust. Would anyone trust a company whose CEO rakes in millions in bonuses despite abysmal performance? Yes, Novell fires GNU/Linux developers (supposedly its business focus) while giving Ron Hovsepian a $6 million bonus. Novell fails to beat its own goals and it had been taking loans while its CEO was essentially robbing the company for personal benefit. Why do so many good reporters fail to see this?
“Whose agenda is actually served by Mono? Microsoft’s of course.”As the treasonous deal with Microsoft demonstrated, Novell is a morally deprived company, with the possibility of imminent financial bankruptcy too, or at least the splitting for sake of survival. Whose agenda is actually served by Mono? Microsoft’s of course. And the more times goes on, the more obvious it becomes. In fact, Novell has begun development which puts Windows in a position of advantage even for Mono [1, 2, 3]. What more compelling proof do proponents of Mono require before the Eureka moment? Some of those Mono proponents are former Microsoft employees and at least one person from the Mono team is working for Microsoft at present.
And with this blunt introduction off my chest, I hand it over to Slated, who equally bluntly wrote the following about what makes Mono so dangerous:
This single, vague yet far reaching example, is as much as I personally have been able to discover.
The ECMA declaration is indeed just a statement of intent.
However, the substantive point is that .NET is Microsoft technology, and as such you can be sure they have it patented up to the hilt, and one way or another Microsoft will use those patents as a weapon against its enemies. It would be extremely naive (in fact dangerous) to assume otherwise, because Microsoft have a violent history of aggression in their crusade to protect their racketeering operation.
“The best case scenario might be that Mono developers find themselves having to abandon whole projects, or at least significant parts of them, in order to “work around” the problem.”The problem is that, outside of Redmond HQ (and presumably UPSTO), nobody has the faintest clue as to what these patents might be, if any, and of course Microsoft have so far remained silent on the issue (much like the infamous “Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents” scandal, except this time the intent is initially somewhat more subtle and subversive, rather than being a more obvious and aggressive FUD attack). This also begs the question of how de Icaza and friends intend to “work around” non-ECMA covered patents, if he doesn’t have the first clue as to what
exactly is, or is not, patented, and by the time he eventually finds out, it may be too late (assuming he isn’t already privy to Microsoft’s darkest secrets).
The best case scenario might be that Mono developers find themselves having to abandon whole projects, or at least significant parts of them, in order to “work around” the problem. The worst case scenario is that Microsoft begins an all-out frontal attack (just like they did with TomTom).
Naturally Microsoft finds this situation very useful, since it enables them to poison Free Software in a subversive fashion, and with little resistance, especially as they have pacified certain key developers with “RAND” assurances. The problem is that the ECMA RAND only pertains to certain parts of the .NET framework, and moreover the “RAND” itself only refers to price (i.e. a fair and reasonable price). This doesn’t actually prevent Microsoft from suing those who implement that technology without a license, and the private (i.e. unofficial) assurances they’ve given regarding “royalty free” are, at this stage, nothing more than hot air (i.e. dependent on implicit trust, rather than being legally binding). To be legally binding, every GNU/Linux distro would require an explicit patent grant from Microsoft, which is not what either the ECMA RAND nor the so-called “covenant” are. Novell presumably has such a grant, as part of their agreement, others don’t. Exactly what sinister implications entering into such an agreement entails, is anyone’s guess, since they are (like everything else Microsoft does) yet another dark secret (Memorandum of Understanding), but you can be sure it isn’t good, or at least it is very good for Microsoft, which means it will inevitably be very bad for everyone else.
IOW it’s all a big mystery, and deliberately so (patent pending).
Then again, maybe not.
After all, this is Microsoft we’re talking about, and there’s very little mystery about their motives, is there? So do we actually even need to know the details? We should all know more than enough about the history of these gangsters, to steer well clear of anything tainted by them.
Here’s a shortlist of things we can safely assume Microsoft considers to be their “enemy”:
. Competing operating systems
. Interoperability (i.e. anything which enables operation on the above)
. Open Standards (ditto)
. Free Software (ditto)
. Any company which distributes or primarily utilises any of the above
And here’s a few key facts about Microsoft:
. They have a global software monopoly
. They abuse that monopoly to suppress competition
. They use highly unethical, and often illegal, tactics in the above
. They are only motivated by power and greed, to attain domination
. They essentially operate like gangsters
Now study those two lists, then give me one good reason why anyone should implicitly trust Microsoft to:
a) Do anything that helps GNU/Linux
b) Keep their legally non-binding “royalty free” promise
c) Keep their “covenant to not sue” promise (hint: TomTom)
d) Not launch a submarine patent attack against Mono projects
e) Not abuse the confusion over Mono as leverage for cross-licensing “deals”, to pervert the GNU/Linux distro landscape into an extension of Microsoft’s portfolio of rotting carcasses
Seems pretty simple to me, but then I am allegedly rather “monochromatic”.
Ultimately, one only needs to ask oneself this single question, to determine whether or not they should have anything to do with Mono, either as users or developers:
Do you trust, and therefore wish to help, the self-declared enemy of Free Software, Microsoft, a company which inhibits all competition using immoral and criminal methods, similar to gangsters running a racketeering operation?
My answer: No.
I really don’t need to know any more.
Case closed. █
“Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand.”
–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO
“[The partnership with Microsoft is] going very well insofar as we originally agreed to co-operate on three distinct projects and now we’re working on nine projects and there’s a good list of 19 other projects that we plan to co-operate on.”
–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO
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