Kim Lux wrote:
On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 19:09 -0700, Craig White wrote:
What am I missing here ?
----
the label... FUD
Is it really that simple, that Microsoft doesn't have a leg to stand
on ? I think its FUD too, but surely there must be more to it than
that ?
Well you can say it would be very poor FUD if it didn't leave you
thinking "there must be more to it than that".
RHAT have obviously been alive to the threat from a patent attack
knowing they have several powerful enemies that are all patented up,
hence their ripping out of chunks of stuff like MP3 support. If anyone
doubted their wisdom they ain't doubting any more.
MSFT have difficulties Antitrust-wise launching an extermination on
Linux as a competitor just when they have been making an effort to make
Antitrust and other suits go away (and their erstwhile tormentors the
Democrats have hands on some of the levers of power). If they do launch
an attack, they will select some specific patents to do it with, and
because Unix and X and httpd and so forth predate MSFT's "innovations"
the guts of the Linux kernel and the OS apps should be relatively
unaffected. Many chunks of the kernel are implementing open standards
which other powerful companies have interests in, eg, USB / Intel, and
Microsoft can't be airly stepping on those toes. So it is part of the
FUD action to say that "Linux" as a whole is under threat by "patents".
What might happen in a war is specific patents will be deployed, bits of
Gnome and KDE will have to be redone to operate differently, bits of
Open Office, and so on. And after the war people will have to tread
carefully, but RHAT treads carefully already. During the war, a lot of
damage will be done to Microsoft and perhaps even legislative perception
of software patents in the US.
In addition, many of the patents may not stand up, plenty are filed as
defensive ammo to make nonagression pacts with other patenthoarders and
not meant to ever be deployed. Microsoft keep using the 'innovation'
word precisely because of their insecurity about just how much they do
apes what has already been done by others, and that has to affect the
viability of their patent stockpile generally.
But you only have to look at the awesome value MSFT themselves demanded
from Novell to "license" all the patents they may think are violated by
SLE* to an arbitrary number of SLE* endusers, yep that's right, they
paid Novell $3xxM, not the other way around ;-)
As it stands it is pure FUD, I'm giving it the resounding *shrug* it
deserves.
-Andy
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