THE PREVIOUS post addressed the words of Jeremy Allison, who had warned about Microsoft at last week's LCA 2010 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. He also warned about Mono [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Allison's colleague, Andrew Tridgell, made similar points regarding software patents last week [1, 2]. Here is new coverage of the subject:
Patents biggest threat to free software
Samba developer Andrew Tridgell reckons the open source community is poor at fighting patent attacks, but says things could improve with a change in strategy.
Samba developer and Australian open source legend Andrew Tridgell has had plenty of experience dealing with interesting legal issues while trying to get Linux servers communicating with Windows, but he now sees the exploitation of patents as the biggest threat to the open source movement.
“We have already given many examples in this Web site where Apple too harmed standards, Free software, and GNU/Linux using patents.”No company other than Microsoft has resorted to Linux extortion using patents (Microsoft later sued, so the threats were not empty). One might argue that Microsoft is therefore the only threat to GNU/Linux, but it's not. We have already given many examples in this Web site where Apple too harmed standards, Free software, and GNU/Linux using patents.
Apple is a company of branding, marketing, and fake hype. It is like Disney in the sense that it creates fantasies and it is sad to see Apple proponents clamouring for more patents from their beloved hardware (and software) vendor. The very latest examples are mostly hardware based [1, 2, 3, 4], but they restrict the market of mobile/embedded Linux. We have already seen Apple threatening Palm's Linux phones using patents [1, 2, 3]. With its patents (whether asserted or not), Apple is harming Free software and software in general (including proprietary). Moreover, this new article indicates that Apple has already castrated another Linux-powered phone:
According to sources, Google was forced to remove multitouch functionality from the Nexus One because Apple owns patents covering its use in mobile devices.
Compiz, Patents, and Ubuntu
No, this isn’t about the stupid max_waves conflict with Apple’s patent that everyone has been ranting (and working around) for the last few years. From what I hear the future 0.9.0 release won’t be hampered by it, but how does Compiz fare with patents? Who made Compiz, and who’s working on it today?
--Bradley M. Kuhn (SFLC)