Microsoft's Patent Pledge "Worse Than Useless"

munchola writes "The Software Freedom Law Center has declared that Microsoft's patent pledge to open source developers is 'worse than useless'. SFLC chief technology officer, Bradley Kuhn, has written to FOSS developers warning them that 'developers are no safer from Microsoft patents now than they were before'. According to Kuhn: 'The patent covenant only applies to software that you develop at home and keep for yourself; the promises don't extend to others when you distribute. You cannot pass the rights to your downstream recipients, even to the maintainers of larger projects on which your contribution is built.'"

Boycott Novell

[10scjed]

http://edu-nix.org/shanecoyle/?p=8 [edu-nix.org] / www.boycottnovell.com

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Business and hippies don't mix. It's like oil and water.

The point is, open source people _aren't_ hippies. They've been running successful businesses for years now. But microsoft wants them to be hippies, wants the world to believe them to be - and now, is trying to make them be, using software patent monopolies to shut down open source businesses. The message is "if you're a hippie hobbyist coder, we won't sue you. But dare to build a business, and we will". Remember, patent and copyright monopolies DESTROY free market capitalism. Microsoft, like most large software corporations, are absolutely terrified of a true free market in software.

"hippy and communist" are just wrong when applied to free software folk: "Raging gun-nut libertarian" is far more accurate. Microsoft are playing with fire.

Patent Pledge for Hobbyist Contributors missing?

[vojtech]

I, too, have been reading through the pledges at the Microsoft website, to figure out the exact wording and implications.

The "Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated Developers" is indeed rather useless, because it only covers creation and local use, and specifically excludes distribution.

The "Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Individual Contributors to openSUSE.org" is also not interesting, since it covers the transfer of code from an author to SUSE, and only that and nothing else.

The "Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Hobbyist Contributors" is referenced from the above one. This should be the one that is covering the community distribution part. But is missing on the Microsoft website: Either it doesn't exist at all and the reference is a mistake, or there is a reason why it was left out from the web.

Has anyone managed to find it? Why Bradley Kuhn doesn't mention it?

Re:Boycott Novell

[Kennon]

This is some amazing shit. No one has any idea what the ramifications, if ANY are going to be from this deal and everyone is so quick to run and lynch a company who has dedicated millions of lines of code to open source projects that they make zero dollars from. This is the same Novell who along with IBM took a stand AGAINST SCO and cost those bastards millions in legal fees. This is the same Novell who is activly sueing M$ for patent violations in the MSOffice product. Shane, how many lines of code have you contributed to any open source projects? What have you done for the community that can come close to comparing to even a little of what Novell has done for Linux in the last few years. Is it really so boring up there in New York that you have nothing better to do other than sit around and stew about some shit that none of us will probably ever even be affected by? All of you armchair lawyers need to STFU and wait until something bad actually happens to the community before you start trying to crucify a fairly benevolent company, relatively speaking, who dedicates themselves daily to the Linux community. WHEN/IF something like that does happen I will be more than happy to join in the ripping of Novell's spine from their body and showing it to them, but until then can we please move on?

Re:Not the Novell Deal

[hurfy]

"The patent covenant only applies to software that you develop at home and keep for yourself;"

Meaning the stuff they would never know about to sue for in the first place. Gee they won't sue you for stuff they don't know you did, how generous ;)

Hmmm, why do this now?

[Colin Smith]

Why now, at this point in time are Linux developers being threatened in this way? Why not last year? Why not two, five years ago?

I reckon they are terrified about Vista... They're terrified it'll be a dead loss with millions jumping ship to Linux. They're trying to fence of Linux from their ex-customers in advance of it's release.

 

Re:Why should they?

[nurb432]

The difference is here in america the goal is not to just 'survive' its to obliterate the competition.

Sorry, I'm excited about this M$ Novell deal

[newgalactic]

Qualifier: I work for a company that has dealings with Novell. However, I'm near the bottom, so it's not like Novell going completely under would kill me or anything. My company could eventually migrate away from SuSe Linux without "too" much pain.

Now, that being said, let me get to the point (and please don't mod this as flame bait because I'm just trying to give my honest opinion.

I'm excited about this Novell/M$ deal. I'm excited about it because it will allow IT departments to give their end users the M$ applications (most office drones do like them) they want. Now, lets get down to this lawsuit business. Hypothetically, lets pretend M$ decides to sue a company for coupleing their applications with a non-Suse distro if Linux. They could manage to squeeze all the money from their bank account (sorry guys/coal mine canaries). This however would never go unnoticed by the business world. It would trigger every company running M$ applications on a non-SuSe back ends to dump their M$ applications an revert to their old OSS applications (if they're running Linux backend, they probably ran a Linux front end at one time). This would be a painful switch, but not the end of the world for them.

M$ is trying to get the Linux community to adopt their applications. We're obviously not going to touch their OS. The money they get from that first lawsuit would never equil the revenue they receive from the expanding Linux community using their applications. It would be very "penny-wise pound-foolish" to choose the money from that one lawsuit over continued revenue in application sales (and it would not take more then one or two of these lawsuits to scare every IT department away from M$ applications forever).

So, here's to a brand new day. Lets drink to not being the first company eaten by the M$ wolf.

"I don't have to outrun the troll, I just have to outrun you"