Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Do Windows users have an "undisclosed balance-sheet liability" too?
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Who can tell what infringes what any more? Also, I wonder if we should
> | even care. Patents were originally created to protect the little guy
Patents weren't really designed to protect the little guy, so much as
to protect
a business from a predatory competitor. By the end of the 19th
century, most patents were so expensive that only larger businesses who
could afford to send lawyers to washington DC to search the patent
archives and make sure that the patent was valid, could really afford
patents. Most patents applications were filed by major corporations on
behalf an employee.
Computer software has always been a bit of a cunnundrum for the patent
office. If you try to patent an algorithym, you are patenting an idea.
But patent law prevents the patenting of ideas, probably because doing
so would stifle creation. The expression of an idea can be protected
by copyright, but copyright only protects one expression of an idea.
The patent office rejected all attempts to patent software until the
RSA patent. The RSA patent was granted because the microcomputer made
it possible to create two "black boxes", one implemented in traditional
hardware, the other as a program running in a microcontroller. When
the judge was challenged to find an expert who could tell which was
which without opening the boxes, and was unable to do so, the patent
was granted.
Several other algorythms, including the Limpel-Ziv-Welsh compression
scheme were implemented the same way. This did create a problem
though. For example, the Limpel-Ziv algorythm could not be implemented
in hardware, which meant that it couldn't be patented at the time. The
LZW algorythm was less efficient, but it could be implemented in pure
hardware, which made it patentable. This algorythm was used in the GIF
and the patent holders wanted BBS operators to pay 50 cents per user
for licenses. It was a one-time fee, but this meant that the web site
had to track users to count them.
> |Countries that see what we're doing and avoid it will be
> | at a competitive advantage.
This is probably very true. The biggest problem is that with no
obstructions to publishing algorythims and making claims, and none of
the beaurocracy of patent application, patent search, and the "pending"
period, the OSS versions will generally be made public first. Given
that it's quite common for several inventors to come up with very
similar devices, it can become quite difficult to prove infringement,
and there is extremely high risk of patent nullification.
> | While we sit around gazing at our
> | navels, they will be free to let developers develop, collaborate,
> | and innovate in peace...
> `----
>
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=216
>
>
> Related:
>
> NT influenced by Unix
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | (Gates:) "And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design.
> | In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the
> | design decisions that have been influenced by that environment. And
> | that's no accident."
Bill has publicly stated that VMS was the primary inspiration for NT
3.x and 4.0.
Some pieces, such as the TCP/IP stack were modified BSD Sockets code.
Starting about NT 4.0 SP 4, Microsoft began to look more closely at the
Linux/Unix model.
Windows 2000 adopted many concepts from Linux, and Windows 2003/XP used
many concepts from the BSD kernel.
Microsoft is still looking at changing their kernel to be even more
like Unix. The Synergy project is an attempt to create a Linux-like
kernel in C#. Based on current public announcements, Microsoft may
consider releasing this kernel in about 10 years.
> | In light of the recent saber rattling about Linux and patents, the "There
> | are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that
> | environment"
Microsoft had two open books to study. They had freeBSD and Linux.
Both were copyrighted, and Microsoft had to license the right to
distribute Unix from SCO, due to a contract with SCO that included
tranferr of all rights to UNIX or anything Unix-like to SCO along with
the sale of Xenix. Gates figured if he was wrong about Unix, he could
buy SCO with "cab fare". The problem was that within hours after the
closing of the contract, SCO contacted most of Microsoft's competitors,
and these companies snapped up the remaining outstanding stock.
When Caldera, which was broadly owned, purchased the SCO support
organization, Microsoft and it's executives snapped up shares of the
company every way it could, mostly through private holding companies.
This made it possible for the funds to be controlled by a small number
of investors without filing requirements, and also made it possible to
avoid public SEC large investor disclosure requirements. IBM is still
trying to get the disclosures and trace back some of the financial
shuffling.
These smaller institutional funds snapped up outstanding shares,
purchased debentures, and eventually obtained enough ownership fire
Ransom Love and to place Daryl McBride in charge of the company.
Shortly after taking the reins, McBride started trying to sue
everybody.
There is also the possibility that Microsoft may have gained economic
interests in Caldera when they settled their antitrust lawsuit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_Systems#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_Love
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progeny_Linux_Systems
> | sentence is particularly interesting if these patent
> | threats include things that are prior Unix art.
The big problem is that nearly all Unix art is prior art, and not
patentable.
On the other hand, it has given Microsoft the ability to nullify
patents of several
plaintiffs attempting to claim that Microsoft had infringed on their
invention.
Even when Microsoft can't get a patent nullified, they can often
disprove infringement.
The same is true with many other companies, including IBM, Sun, Kodak,
and nearly any other major innovator in the IT industry.
> | "In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix" is also telling.
Many elements of Unix were integrated into more recent versions of NT.
Windows 2000, 2003, and Windows XP have very similar memory management,
library organization, and I/O mechanisms similar to those used in BSD
Unix.
> | I said before that I don't think that's the case;
Microsoft isn't trying to claim ownership of Unix. Microsoft did do
Unix development on a variant called Xenix, but Microsoft sold all
rights to Xenix to SCO. Keep in mind that Microsoft had Xenix for a
Tandy machine based on the 68000 processor. At the point that
Microsoft was talking to IBM, Microsoft did actually have an operating
system, Xenix, which it could have handed over to IBM, but AT&T might
have sued Microsoft.
SCO did make a few innovations for UNIX, and in 1990, SCO OpenDesktop
looked very promising as a competitor to Windows 3.1. Dell even
offered PCs with SCO. Not sure exactly why Dell dropped SCO so
suddenly, or why SCO dropped out of the desktop market so quickly, but
they did, and the market was left to Microsoft, and Linux.
> | I think the patent stuff is talking about things like
> | Samba and Mono, but even there the "influenced by that environment"
Remember that SMB was a joint effort of IBM, Microsoft, and 3Com. IBM
and 3Com have already thrown their weight behind Linux. 3Com was one
of the first board makers to provide ethernet drivers for Linux.
As for Mono, it's 1/2 of the equipment needed to run .Net client
applications. Mono provides an OSS VM, a C# compiler, and some core
libraries, but to run Microsoft .Net applications, you need Microsoft
licensed software, much of which is patented.
The irony of SMB is that Microsoft actually followed the Samba model.
Keep in mind that WINS on Linux was able to exploite a secret "trap
door" which gave Microsoft (or any other hacker) the ability to take
over as the "master WINS server". Normally, you could have a priority
from 1 to 30, but Linux and the hackers and Microsoft could be 31.
Linux combined Samba with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), and
PAM could be configured to use LDAP. This meant that any LDAP server,
could be used to manage security. This slammed the back door on
Microsoft and the hackers.
Microsoft then introduced ActiveDirectory, which also had a back door,
but the client refused to talk to any LDAP server that wasn't an
ActiveDirectory server. There were two fields within the Kerberos
portion of the client/server that were used to validate the
client/server, which made it possible for a "secret" UUID to access ANY
ActiveDirectory server.
> | could be important in the court of public opinion if not in actual law.
Microsoft spends nearlyr $4 billion on advertizing to sell Microsoft
software to people who will have almost no choice in the matter. This
is NOT to get people to actually purchase Microsoft Windows on their
next PC, but rather to get the Mass Media publishers to publish content
which is favorable to Microsoft, and, when the news is really bad like
a videotaped deposition which makes Bill Gates look like a hardened
Criminal, to cover Elian Gonzales or some other "Tabloid Story" as if
it were the second coming.
> http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/gates_quote.html
>
> Microsoft's stolen code and IP infringements
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Soon, MS-DOS 6.0 was released, including the Microsoft DoubleSpace
> | disk compression utility program. Stac successfully sued Microsoft
> | for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm
> | used in DoubleSpace...
> |
> | F. Scott Deaver, owner of Failsafe Designs, says Microsoft is guilty of
> | the "outright theft" of his product name and intellectual property
> | (IP)...
That is correct. And the Jury awarded Stac nearly 200 million dollars.
Microsoft settled during the appeal process in exchange for immunity
from criminal prosecution for all Microsoft executives.
> | In April 2001, Intertrust initiated a lawsuit against Microsoft. The
> | lawsuit ultimately accused Microsoft of infringing 11 of Intertrust's
> | patents and almost 130 of the company's patent claims...
I think Microsoft won that one, by pointing out that most of the
patents and patent claims were actually first implemented by Emacs in
1980.
> | Telecoms company AT&T accused Microsoft of infringing its patent for
> | a digital speech coder in its Window software in a lawsuit it filed
> | in 2000...
I believe Microsoft beat that one by citing prior art dating back to
the 1980s.
I think the Audio Response System used in directory assistance, which
was created by Computer Consoles, was prior art, dating back to 1984,
and was prior art that was unpatentable at the time because it was
software.
> | The likelihood of Microsoft having to pay millions of dollars in
> | damages for infringing the contested Eolas patent for web browser
> | technology increased last week when the US Patent and Trademark
> | Office reaffirmed the patent's validity...
This one looks like another bogus set of claims. In this case, the
jury agreed not to nullify the patents, but was completely hung with
regard to infringement. It seems that many members of the Jury were
not satisfied that there was a preponderance of the evidence that
indicated that Microsoft had knowingly infringed on the patent. The
dates and times were so close, that they could not prove that Microsoft
had not intutively derived the technology, or obtained it from an
unpatentable source (undergraduate student assignment).
> Is Microsoft infringing upon Xerox, Apple and Unix intellectual property?
> http://www.openaddict.com/page.php?27
Microsoft knows that they are using Xerox, Apple, and Unix intellectual
property, but much of this intellectual property was released under
terms which merely indemnified the original authors against lawsuits.
Xerox PARC was a skunk-works project intended to increase the demand
for copiers. They saw the Alto as a threat to that market. After all,
if users could view graphics and documents on the computer, they
woudn't need to make copies. Mosts of the Xerox revenue at the time
was based on number of copies made, and the traffic was metered. Xerox
provided the toner, paper, and defended the right to use a copier, and
the customer paid a flat rate, usually 2-5 cents per copy.
When Apple showed up at PARC, no one made them sign nondisclosure
agreements, no one made them sign anything other than a guest registry.
No one kept a log of who was shown what. In addition, Xerox had
already published a couple of articles and a book on SmallTalk-80.
Even Byte Magazine had an article which described principles we take
for granted today, and this was back in the late 1970s.
http://www.parc.xerox.com/about/history/default.html
(look at 1976)
About the same time that Bill Gates was trying to get BASIC loaded into
an MITS altair using a paper tape reader, the Xerox PARC team was
using mice and Windows.
Xerox did get revenge though. They patented the Virtual Desktop, and
proceeded to license it ONLY to MIT X11 licensees. In other words, if
you wanted virtual desktop, you had to do it using X11, and using the
MIT license.
> The Apple vs. Microsoft GUI Lawsuit
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Without warning, Apple filed suit against Microsoft in federal court on
> | March 17, 1988 for violating Apple's copyrights on the "visual displays"
> | of the Macintosh. (Apple also filed suit against HP for its NewWave
> | environment that ran on top of Windows 2.0.)
This court battle raged on for nearly 12 years of legal maneuvering.
Eventually, Microsoft settled with Apple, perhaps because now it was
Linux that was making FWVM look and feel exactly like the Windows 95
graphical user interface.
> | Apple's suit included 189 contested visual displays that Apple
> | believed violated its copyright.
One of the challenges here was that Apple couldn't find a legal
precedent that would actually "stick". Trademarks such as the Apple
Trash can were replaced with a shredder, which later became a trash
can.
Eventually, Microsoft purchased the "Look and Feel" of Motif from HP.
Some of this technology was used in Windows 3.1, and much more was used
in Windows 95.
> http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/0825.html
> Windows Vista vs. Mac OS X: The Copycat Olympics
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | In Microsoft's defense, though, why wouldn't you want to "borrow" ideas
> | from other successful products? Vista, Leopard, and Linux are all
> | competing against each other, although in reality, each one is better for
> | a different set of users.
Don't tell Microsoft this. They feel that "Windows du Jur" is the ONLY
thing that ANYONE should EVER want, need, use, be allowed to use, be
allowed to purchase. If Microsoft could get away with it, they would
probably force retailers to stop selling Macs.
> | Apple may go on and on about the similarities
> | between Tiger and Vista, but they're there for a reason.
Sure, Apple had a huge winner, and, like Linux, is experiencing double
digit growth on a quarterly basis.
> | When innovation fails,
Microsoft had one "innovation" - the "per processor license". When the
courts ruled this to be illegal, they innovated the "Cliff Tiered
Pricing Schedule". In each case, the net effect is that the OEMs must
pay for more licenses than they possibly sell, or pay nearly twice the
price for fewer licenses.
> http://www.osweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2300&Itemid=449
>
>
> All the Myth about Microsoft!
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | * Microsoft was first with graphical user interface
Xerox had the Alto in 1976, Microsoft introduced Windows in 1984.
Emacs had the first Windows in 1974, and drop-down menues in 1975.
> | * Microsoft designed BASIC Language
DEC Basic dates back to the 1960s.
> | * Microsoft designed visual basic
OS/9 had visual basic in 1979.
Boreland had the interactive IDE with Turbo Pascal in the early 1980s.
Turbo C and Turbo C++ were introduced in the 1980s as well.
> | * Microsoft invented DOS
Seattle Computer Company offered QDOS. The source code, and the
instructions for building a QDOS compatible Z-80 system was published
in a computer or ham radio magazine (73?).
> | * Microsoft designed the first spreadsheet - Excel
Visicalc was implemented for the Apple II in 1979
EzCalc was a spreadsheet for text based displays - 1980.
Lotus 1-2-3 came out about the same time as MS-DOS.
IBM had a spreadsheet for the 3270 display back in the mid 1970s.
The spreadsheet was patterned after the columnar displays used by
accountants for smaller customers.
> | * Microsoft designed the first word processor
Vi, Emacs, WordPerfect, WordStar, Xedit, and tico were all available
long before Word.
Many of these did offer "WYSIWYG" formatting. Several WYSIWYG word
processors were available for MS-DOS, Mac, and Unix years before Word.
Even multimode WYSIWYG editors such as FrameMaker and Applix preceeded
the Text/Pictures/Graphs/Spreadsheet integrated editor we now call
word.
> | * First with Internet browser
Lynx, Viola, Cello, Mosiac, and NetScape, all developed by staunch UNIX
users and UNIX supporters, most of whom despised Microsoft. And the
dislike has only increased.
> http://196.2.70.231:8080/ict_blog/open-ict-hacks/microsoft-myth
> See how Microsoft tries to change perspective in patent substance and rationale:
> Big businesses boast of patent benefits, for small businesses
Big businesses file for patents to protect themselves against unethical
lawyers who will go after their deep pockets on bogus patent claims of
technology which may have been published before it was patented.
Lawyers love to help small businesses file patents because they want to
try and sue some big company with deep pockets and get some huge
multi-million dollar settlement - simply because the cost of fighting a
patent lawsuit - especially in a Jury trial, usually exceed the costs
of the quick settlement. Ask for $3 billion, settle for $30 million,
and walk away with a $10 million contingency fee. Deduct another $10
million from the award for expenses.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/99155/big-businesses-boast-of-patent-benefits-for-small-businesses.html
>
> Commerce Secretary names Schramm to innovation panel
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | He will be part of a lineup that includes the Microsoft Corp. CEO
> | Steve Ballmer, 3M CEO George Buckley, UPS Chairman and CEO Michael Eskew,
> | IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano and Wal-Mart Stores Vice Chairman John Menzer.
> `----
> http://biz.yahoo.com/bizj/061206/1386414.html?.v=2
I find it amazing that Ballmer will be among the "innovators". Bill
was the brains, Steve was the marketing. Ballmer used the same
techniques to sell Windows that he used to sell drugs. His primary
relationship with Gates at Harvard was that he could procure the
hookers.
I wonder, is Ballmer part of Skull and Bones club? Like G. W. Bush?
> And somewhat related:
>
> Changing the Report, After the Vote
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | That agreement was nearly imperiled last weekend, though. Gerri
> | Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft's Worldwide Public
> | Sector division, sent an e-mail message to fellow commissioners
> | Friday evening saying that she "vigorously" objected to a paragraph
> | in which the panel embraced and encouraged the development of open
> | source software and open content projects in higher education.
> `----
> http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/01/commission
That's just plain funny, at about 8 levels.
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