Gates: Microsoft IP Finds Its Way Into Free Software 848
Andy Tai writes "While speaking to financial analysts and commenting on the SCO lawsuit, Bill Gates made the claim that Microsoft's IP is also included in Free/Open source software. Without being specific, he said "There's no question that in cloning activities, IP from many, many companies, including Microsoft, is being used in open-source software. When people clone things, that often becomes unavoidable." Considering Microsoft's claims of ownership over technologies like CIFS, does this mean Microsoft may also launch SCO-style attacks against Free Software/Open Source?"
Re:What about Xerox? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh, my. (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft actaully does use GPL code as well in some of their unix interopability software. Again, believe it or not, they actually comply with the license.
With the pressure on Microsoft, I don't think they would risk getting caught stealing code. If such an accusation came up and had even the slightest whiff of legitimacy, I'd expect to see several MS developers fired immediately and MS offering a large settlement deal.
Re:FUD Wars, Episode n, n=? (Score:5, Informative)
IP is not just CODE (Score:5, Informative)
Also, copyright covers the right to make derivative works. So if there's an icon or other UI element that was a tweaked Windows element then that's technically copyright infringement. It's awefully hard to prove though (given the Apple v. MSFT precedent.
In short, Gates is right but it doesn't mean they'll start firing lawsuits against open source...They didn't previously sue their other competitors unlike how Sun/Oracle lobbied and/or sued MSFT.
Re:i'll probably get flamed for this, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Because free software cloning doesn't work that way. When someone write a clone of some Microsoft product, it is assumed that they don't disassemble the original and copy the code (the equivalent of your chemical analysis). The clone is a completely different piece of code with the same capabilities as the originals. Pepsi Cola similarly clean-room engineered their version of sugared water without analyzing the chemical composition of Coca Cola, and they're still around.
Re:The fact that... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The fact that... (Score:3, Informative)
Days of Linux are counted (Score:3, Informative)
This is very regrettable that Linux has got so much attention these days especially from Microsoft. We know perfectly that Microsoft was able to muscle out any other competitor (IBM, Lotus, Borland, Netscape, DR DOS just to name few). Linux is unusual in that sense that it does not rely on the usual commercial cycle of investment-production-sales. But this does not mean that it is not prone to Microsoft tactics. Microsoft did not always use only economic means against its competitors. It was able to fend off antitrust lawsuit without much trouble. Sometimes the tactics was to hire competitors' execs or similar variation. It means that MS has something except for FUD to fight Linux with and there is no doubt that it will do, and it will win.
Using IP laws against Linux is indefensible tactics simply because Linux community is not able to afford to hire enough lawers to defend itself. Probably the only viable solution is to take Linux development and use out of the US and Europe. And this is where globalization plays a bad role: if IP laws are used then they are enforceable pretty much everywhere. Probably China is the most promising country because it has a rather independent policy and its government does invest into Linux.
There is much trouble ahead fro Linux, it had become a victim of its own popularity.
Transfer of skills to Germany (Score:3, Informative)
Currently Airbus Industrie is overtaking Boeing as the largest manufacturer of aircraft, a major transfer of skills and business from the "Advanced" US to the "Backward" EU (and, before the FUD starts, Airbus repaid its government loans long ago.) The US Government perhaps needs to consider whether the practices of US companies may cause the centre of technology innovation to move out of the US in the longer term - except that for the present administration, the long term is 2004. Oh well, Bill can afford to retire anytime. Pity his developers can't.
Re:Oh, my. (Score:3, Informative)
No, Gates is probably right (Score:5, Informative)
What he's claiming is very interesting for people that aren't familiar with the nastiness of big business, though. Sort of an eye-opener for me a few years back, and tech folks should be aware of this if they're interested in IP.
See, you know how most Free Software folks complain bitterly about (at least some) software patents, saying that it makes things really hard to operate? They aren't lying. Engineers working at big companies ran into the same problem *years* ago. You simply cannot build things in a world with this many tech patents. It's impossible. You'd have to check through huge numbers of patents to do anything.
So big business came up with a solution. They just cross-license *everything*. One company is free to use all of another company's (or organizations...for example, MIT and Microsoft cross-license) patents. Most tech companies with decent IP portfolios do this with their competitors. For example, Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, etc, all cross license each others' patents.
This seems, at first, counterproductive. After all, isn't the point of patents to give you a short-term edge over competitors, to encourage new development? Nope. Patents in a situation like this still provide one big benefit to their owners -- they maintain oligopolies. If a new hard drive manufacturer comes along and wants to make hard drives, they can't. Seagate, WD, etc own masses of IP, enough to keep the new vendor from entering the market.
This is why patents are pretty frusterating in the world of big business. Go work at a corporate research lab...any patents you come up with don't do your company any good against their competitors. They just keep anyone else from entering the arena.
Now, Gates is troubled enough by Linux to pull the patent oligopoly card out of his sleeve, which normally doesn't get played. MS cross-licenses with *huge* numbers of organizations. They own massive amounts of IP. And yes, it's almost certain that they have rights to a large number of patents that Linux does not have rights to.
Hell, last time Slashdot ran a contest asking for silly patents (a ways back, maybe a year ago), I searched for "computer". First ten hits contained the just-granted patent on the table-lookup optimization for computing CRC-32s. Now, *everyone* does this...modem manufacturers, lots of hardware vendors. Not doing it is stupid. And maybe this patent would have gotten challenged if the owner went after, say, 3com with it. But instead, it's almost certainly in a large patent portfolio somewhere, waiting around for a day when its owner feels threatened by a newcomer to the industry. Then it can pull out its portfolio and start beating folks up.
This is not a trivially fixable feature of the patent system. Most US corporate research (probably foreign as well...I'm just not that familiar with non-US legalities) depends upon the oligopoly benefits provided by patents.
And just throwing out the patent system has other problems. I'm not sure that, say, RSA encryption would *ever* have been developed without a patent system to provide encouragement.
The best thing to do, I think, would be to cap tech patents at seven years, so that companies have to keep frantically coming up with new tech. Wastes more on lawyers -- it costs a couple of thousand per patent, and more patents would have to be produced to compensate -- but that at least alleviates some of the effect.
Patents, not copyright, are the real danger... (Score:4, Informative)
The term IP is confusing and I would urge that it not be used. It is confusing since it is often used to lump desparate laws of Copyright, Patent and Trademark as well as others together.
By using this term Mr. Gates is raising questions about all of these things lumped into that term, not just Patents or Trademarks.
The real question here is, can any company give us complete assurance that copyrighted or unlicensed material is not present in their software? Most companies DO NOT indemnify you for their infrigements (including MS even with their new license).
The answer to the above question is NO. Why? Because while Copyrights are easy to avoid infringement on in most cases, Patents are not. With Patents, it's like walking throught a mine field. There is no way of telling, short of doing an exhaustive search, if something is patented or not. In fact *MOST* patent attorneys will advise against doing such as search (really!!).
To learn more about patents and their evils in the software industry, please see the petition in my URL.
Thanks, GJC
You're wrong, jizzmop (Score:1, Informative)
Bostic: Both. Certainly some of it is the original BSD code. Both the network stack and the filesystem work came from the original BSD code. Doing a good network stack is a very difficult project -- the BSD stack has at least 15 years of development in it now, and lots of very bright people spending serious research time on making it work. Linux and Microsoft both started from scratch, and it showed.
That said, FreeBSD has done a much better job of leveraging the community for quality than Linux has. Note the phrase "for quality" -- that's what makes that sentence correct. Linux is still very much directed by a small core, while FreeBSD has pushed the core developer group out into a larger set of people. One of the things I admire most about Jordan Hubbard is the job he's done in herding the cats and pushing FreeBSD's quality forward. He's done a better job of distributed management than we ever did at UC Berkeley (although, in our defense, he has better tools and infrastructure than we ever had at UC Berkeley, for example, the Web and high-speed networking).
The start of software patents (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't some guy suddenly deciding to patent software. The Supreme Court decided in Diamond v. Diehr [bitlaw.com] that the USPTO's regulations at the time were unconstitutional. In case you don't follow the link, Diamond v. Diehr was about a method for vulcanizing rubber that used software connected to sensors to determine how best to heat the rubber.
So the USPTO (part of the executive branch of government) was prohibited (by the judicial branch) from following their current regulations. They got no help from Congress (the legislative branch) by creating new laws to help them guide new regulations. The USPTO can't unilaterally revert to their previous rules. Either someone needs to bring a new case to the Supreme Court to challenge the current USPTO regulations, or Congress needs to pass laws that will pass a judicial challenge.
What what whaaat? (Score:3, Informative)
All applications must be released to the community? That's just plain untrue. Isn't there a way to let the people reading that article know that he's lying?
Link to MS document (Score:2, Informative)
Re:We don' need no steenking halloween documents! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: The fact that... (Score:1, Informative)
Well, let's see, through reverse engineering and re-implementation:
Win32 API (WINE)
The start menu
Look and feel of the GUI
Samba
Active Directory
DAV
In all of that, are you sure that patented methods weren't used, the same algorithms weren't used, and that nobody swiped some helper functions or snippets of complex code?
Re:Oh, my. (Score:2, Informative)
Intertrust
Samba algos
MS is well known for stealing. In the past, they outright stole, but due to stacker lawsuit, they normally try to buy the company or destroy them first. The problem is that Intertrust has no intention of dealing with MS as they are owned by sony and a few others.
Re:Oh, my. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The fact that... (Score:3, Informative)
Any font they made will have a design patent on it.
They have a patent on an IM that displays contact lists from multiple IM providers, allows you to message them using different protocols, and formats all of their incoming messages into a consistent theme for your client. Sounds like GAIM, or Trillian, etc...
They have a patent on fast conversion of floats to ints...by not caring what rounding mode the CPU is in and just taking what it gives.
There are lots more. A total of 2713, including all of their design patents on mice and mouse buttons and keyboards and keyboard KEYS, etc.
Oh, and while copyright may not protect you from having your UI look and feel cloned, design patents WILL, although they are more specific.
Re:What about Xerox? (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously you haven't read the British "Sliderule Vs. Abicus" decision of 1748. It stated that the inheritor of the patent on the Abicus, one John Smith of Sussex (he had a lineage that can be traced back to Rome, Greece, Egypt, and several other interesting places), had no right to the patent on the sliderule, even though it also was a mathematical device and incorporated addition and subtraction in its functions.
Re:Oh, of course not... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stupid! (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but not for the reasons you think they did. Apple lost because the judge ruled that the license which MS had acquired from Apple for the GUI "look-and-feel" concepts in Windows 1.0 applied to all future versions as well, and not simply the single version Apple felt they had licensed it for.
In other words, Apple lost because the judge said their patent license to MS was broader than they thought it was, and not because the license/patent was itself invalid.
Re:Oh, my. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Stupid! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:We don' need no steenking halloween documents! (Score:5, Informative)
In March 1995, the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals overturned [mit.edu] the 1993 decision of Judge Keeton of Boston in Lotus' lawsuit against Borland. Lotus sued Borland for copyright infringement on Lotus 1-2-3. In its decision the appeals court determined that Lotus' menu structures, incorporated into Borland's Quatro Pro spreadsheet, are "an uncopyrightable method of operation".
Re:No, Gates is probably right (Score:2, Informative)
Thats so damned old it can vote in some locales! I did that on a TRS-80 Color Computer nearly 20 years ago. And incorporated it into the last 2 or 3 versions of zmodem for os9 to boot, it was good for about a 200cps speedup on a machine that just barely able to do 4800 baud without flow controls.
If its patented, the reference materials (Byte magazine IIRC) I was using at the time sure as hell didn't mention it.
Would that constitute prior art?
--
Cheers, Gene
Re:Oh, my. (Score:4, Informative)
Stac. Timeline. Syn'X.
Microsoft have "stolen" code more than once. But because it's closed source, it is difficult for the victims to discover and prove the infringement.
History has shown that Microsoft chooses to fight the accusations in court. Whether the Microsoft developers were fired or not, I don't know.
Re:Oh, my. (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft have "stolen" code more than once. But because it's closed source, it is difficult for the victims to discover and prove the infringement
Ah, this old chestnut.
Stac was a PATENT INFRINGEMENT case. No code was touched.
here's some words from an
expert in the field of compression and patents:
http://www.ross.net/compression/ [ross.net]
" Waterworth patented a LZ77 variant (US Patent 4701745). This algorithm
is generally referred to as as LZRW1, because Ross Williams reinvented
it later and posted it on comp.compression on April 22, 1991. The same
algorithm has later been patented by Gibson & Graybill (US Patent
5049881). The patent office failed to recognize that the same algorithm
was patented twice, even though the wording used in the two patents is
very similar.
The Waterworth patent is now owned by Stac, which won a lawsuit against
Microsoft, concerning the compression feature of MS-DOS 6.0. Damages
awarded were $120 million. (Microsoft and Stac later settled out of
court.) "
From his resume: "Consulting to Microsoft: In 1993 Stac initiated a
software patent lawsuit against Microsoft over the doublespace data
compression feature of MS-DOS 6. As part of its defence, Microsoft
retained me as an expert in text data compression. Tasks involved
searching for prior art and evaluating patents. "
Most importantly, however:
http://www.ross.net/compression/introduction.html [ross.net]
"Unfortunately, during this happy rollout, some patents popped out of
the US patent system that cast a shadow over the LZRW series algorithms,
and they became effectively unuseable in any practical application. If
you want to use them in any product (whether free or commercial), you
will have to do some in-depth patent homework and algorithm
development/modification so as to avoid infringement. If you think
that's easy, then you should be aware that Microsoft tried to use an
LZ77/LZRW1/etc variant, specifically designed not to infringe existing
patents, in its MS-DOS V6 operating system, and ended up having to pay
Stac about $80m in the resulting patent lawsuit. For this reason, I
would like to take this opportunity to state that the code provided in
this web (and FTP site) is provided with the intention that it be used
for educational and recreational use only. "
Re:We don' need no steenking halloween documents! (Score:2, Informative)
Spyglass Soars on new Microsoft Deal [com.com]
Blue Mountain Greeting Cards
Deposition [microsoft.com]
The standard e-mail message notifying a recipient of the availability of a greeting card from Microsoft's own "insider.MSN.com/greetings" website is sorted by the Outlook Express beta release to the Junk Mail folder. In order to confirm this, on December 9, 1998, five greetings cards from plaintiff's web site and five from the insider.MSN.com/greetings site were sent to me. I received the e-mail notification for these ten cards with the junk mail feature of the Outlook Express beta release turned on, but otherwise set to its default settings. All ten e-mail notification messages were sorted by the Outlook Express beta release to the Junk Mail folder. A copy of the Junk Mail folder showing the receipt of these ten messages is attached as Exhibit C.
(So, in other words, Blue Mountain had a frivolous suit and went to court instead of trying to fix the problem. Microsoft originally approached them to work together to provide a workaround. Blue Mountain Arts dismissed it out of hand.)
Re:The start of software patents (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, it was.
First of all note that Diamond v. Diehr was a 5 to 4 decision with strongly dissenting opinion. I could give links explaining why Diamond v. Diehr was in error, but lets ignore the dissent and assume the decision was entirely correct.
The question before the court was "Can one patent a machine that transforms materials physically under the control of a programmed computer?"
The court ruled that: "When a claim containing a mathematical formula implements or applies the formula in a structure or process which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function which the patent laws were designed to protect (e. g., transforming or reducing an article to a different state or thing), then the claim satisfies 101's requirements."
They further state "Transformation and reduction of an article `to a different state or thing' is the clue to the patentability of a process claim".
The court quoted another case and affirmed that "a mathematical algorithm must be assumed to be within the "prior art", though they did not agree with the way Diamond tried to apply it. All software is in fact nothing more than a mathematical algorithm.
Therefore Diamond v. Diehr upheld that ALL POSSIBLE SOFTWARE AUTOMATICALLY FALLS INTO PRIOR ART.
The head of the patent office latched onto a few specific comments in this decision and ignored the rest of what the court said. He directly violated their specific warning that "insignificant postsolution activity will not transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process. Ibid. 14 To hold otherwise would allow a competent draftsman to evade the recognized limitations on the type of subject matter eligible for patent protection."
The entire patent granting process was overhauled in in exactly the manner the court warned against. Now a patent can be granted on a wordprocessor.
Most quotes came from here, [gigalaw.com] and some from here. [oyez.org]
-
Re:No, Gates is probably right (Score:3, Informative)
There may be some companies that simply rely on ignoring transgressions, but the ones that I've seen generally cross-license.
Reverse Engineering != Cloning (Score:3, Informative)
Reverse Engineering (which is completely legal) is not the same as Cloning.
Anyone with half a brain would know that cloning something like CIFS isn't very practical given that that would require cloning windows DLLS and stuff - which don't work under Linux/*BSD/etc.