Microsoft needs to lay off the Linux FUD
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| It is almost a year since Microsoft struck its controversial intellectual
| property deal with Novell, and almost five months since the company claimed
| that various pieces of unspecified open source software are chock-full of
| Microsoft patent infringements, but when it comes down to the question of
| exactly what IP Microsoft is talking about, we are still none the wiser.
|
| [..]
|
| Without any kind of substantive claims to back up these statements, this is
| pretty much the dictionary definition of FUD. Fear, uncertainty and doubt.
|
| The same kind of blathering that drove The SCO Group into the ground.
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http://cbr.co.za/news.aspx?pklNewsId=26793&pklCategoryID=385
Thoughts on invention, innovation, and patents from 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'
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| Whether or not hardware patents in the past have encouraged invention, it
| seems clear that software patents today are harming innovation and progress.
| Obvious and overly broad patents are being used to either prevent competition
| or as a way for patent trolls that produce nothing valuable to extract rents
| from companies that do. Maddeningly, they're not even needed for their stated
| purpose. Progress in the software arts does not depend on granting such an
| extreme form of intellectual monopoly. Let's throw the damn things out.
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http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/thoughts_innovations_and_patents
Related:
Critic of Software Patents Wins Nobel Prize in Economics
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| doom writes "You've probably already heard that the Nobel Prize
| for Economics was given to three gents who were working on advances
| in mechanism design theory. What you may not have heard is what one
| of those recipients was using that theory to study: 'One recent
| subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the
| value of software patents. He determined that software was a market
| where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built
| closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many
| different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents
| might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than
| stimulating progress.' Here's one of Maskin's papers on the
| subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).
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http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotYourRightsOnline/~3/170631743/article.pl
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