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Re: Windows Starts Learning from GNU/Linux

On Aug 15, 12:09 am, "[H]omer" <s...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> > Did Microsoft just patent sudo?
> > ,----[ Quote ]
> > | 1985, huh? And when did this Microsoft patent happen? It was filed in
> > | 2000. Well gee, that doesn't make sense. How'd they get the patent?
> > | It certainly falls under the category of "obvious" if there's prior
> > | art such as sudo.
> > |
> > | What makes this whole thing funny, though, is something I saw a couple
> > | days ago. Head over to Builder-AU and listen to Peter Watson from
> > | Microsoft. He says,
> > |
> > |   "User Account Control is a great idea and strategically
> > |   a direction that sort of all operating systems and all technology
> > |   should be heading down"
> > |
> > | Excuse me? Does he really believe this is all Microsoft's great new
> > | idea?
> > |
> > | In the end, this seems like a patent that Microsoft will hold up and
> > | say "we have a patent and Linux is violating it!"

> No doubt this is one of the infamous "235 infringements". Did Microsoft
> steal the other 234 as well, one wonders?

Microsoft is more or less caught between a rock and a hard place.
Because there is no record of 99.999% of all prior art written prior
to 1994, and because even after that date less than 99.9% of all
software written since 1994 was actually patented (due to the high
cost of actually filing a patent application and completing the entire
search and grant process), almost ANYTHING is up for grabs by ANYONE.

Companies like Microsoft, HP, IBM, and Kodak have to apply for as many
patents as they can, and list as much prior art as possible in each
patent application.  This isn't because they expect to collect
$Billions from lots of "Mom and pop software companies" but because
they can't afford to have to defend against unrecorded art that has
been granted a patent simply because the prior art that did exist was
not listed in any other patent applications.

These companies don't apply for the patents because they want to
collect royalties, they apply for the patents primarily because they
don't want some ambulance chaser lawyer with a portfolio of patents
from kitchen table software companies attempting to collect huge
royalties from them.  However, having the patents makes it possible
for them to cross-license those patent rights with other companies,
which makes them even better shielded from predator lawyers.

Getting a patent is relatively easy compared to enforcing it.  On the
other hand, if you have a lawyer hoping for a 30% contingency on a
multi-million dollar settlement, he might we willing to create lots of
legal barriers and discovery motions, not to mention attempting to
collect royalties from secondaries (customers of the defendant)  which
can adversely impact overall revenues, especially on newer products.

Microsoft has actually lost some really insane patent lawsuits
lately.  In a recent case, a company that claimed ownership of MP3
attempted to extort $billion from Microsoft, even though Microsoft had
properly licensed the technology from one of the inventors.  The
process of asset liquidation, divestitures, reorganizations, and co-
ownership left enough confusion for a jury to find for the "Little
Guy", even though the facts didn't support their claim or their
verdict.

Microsoft has lost a number of Jury trials lately.  It seems that
Microsoft isn't as popular as they once were.  Juries tend to be more
willing to award huge amounts to plaintiffs even when there is no
case.

The bigger problem for Microsoft is that they have a harder time
proving that they produced the "Prior art", especially against OSS and
Unix based software.  Even if Microsoft did originate something, their
refusal to disclose it publicly (in the form of an earlier patent
application) tends to make it harder to prove that technology they
might have invented, wasn't intuitively derived.

If someone looks at a watch, and understands the concept of the
movement of the hands and the core functionality, if they never open
the watch to explore the mechanism itself, they could come up with a
completely different way of implementing the same functionality, and
end up nullifying the value of the original patent.  If they came up
with the same implementation, but never opened the watch case, this
would nullify the entire patent.

Defending Microsoft patents against OSS would be very difficult.  OSS
has the majority of the publicly available prior art, which means that
it's much more likely that someone familiar with OSS software could
intuitively derive the technology based on OSS technology.

The bigger problem is tracing the pedegree of an idea.  Microsoft
purchased much of the technology used in Windows from HP, who was a
partner in the development of Motif, along with IBM and DEC.  Much of
their communications protocol came from BSD based code.  But not every
idea is so well documented.  There may be patches to the BSD code that
were only published as GPL patches that were "Clean Room" engineered,
or worse, smuggled in by a contractor, developer, or even a customer,
without declaring the nature of it's origin.

Microsoft suddenly sees a Linux vendor pointing to enhancements to a
technology that Microsoft thinks Microsoft invented, and thinks that
their patents and intellectual property rights were being violated.
If the initial release dates of the patch are close enough to the
revision dates, and the proprietary version was never implemented as a
patch, it might be difficult to identify exactly when the GPL code was
folded into Windows.

The problem for Microsoft is that they are stepping on land mines
every time they apply for a patent.  If they apply for the patent, and
publish the source code, it becomes easier for OSS developers to
identify the stolen code and claim original authorship.  If
Microsoft's management and legal team didn't know that the new code
was "smuggled in", it can be very hard for them to believe that they
were not the first inventors.

Many companies have had problems with receiving code from customers,
partners, or clients, or even consultants or vendors, and thinking
that this contributed code was their original creation.  If they
attempt to patent the code, and they don't list the prior art from the
original source, they risk not only losing the patent, but also having
the patent ownership revert to someone who may not be easy to bargain
with.

Imagine what would happen if Microsoft tried to patent technology
which had become a critical part of XP and Vista, only to find out
that the code was originally created by the Free Software Foundation,
who owns all intellectual property rights, and even listed the claims
being made in Microsoft's patent application in their published
documentation.

Worse, supposed that this claim and the code, could easily be found
using Google, including source code that dates back to as much as 5
years before Microsoft's first implementation.  Can you imagine Steve
Ballmer trying to explain to Richard Stallman why Microsoft cannot
publish Windows Source code, and cannot have a functional version of
Windows without the GPL code?

> --
> K.http://slated.org
>
> .----
> | "Proprietary licenses, the crack cocaine of software finance."
> |  - Matt Asay, CNET
> `----
>
> Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
>  05:05:37 up 6 days,  4:00,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.11, 0.19



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