On Tue, Nov 21, 2006, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: there is now one IT company too many": > > If they sell/give away Linux, they have to sell or give away the version > > with the infringing code removed to satisfy section 6. > > > Hearing you talk about it makes it sound as if there is actual > infringing code. There is no actual infringing code. It's all just > patent related vapor. Sometimes patent related vapor materializes into > costly law suites, but that doesnt' change the fact it's vapor.
When SCO sued claiming that their *copyrighted* code was put into Linux, their claims were easy (for us) to dismiss: either they are false, or if they are true, just tell us where, and we'll remove these pieces of code. Unfortunately, for patents, the situation is far far worse. It always makes me laugh (sadly) when I see Linux distributions avoid MP3, RSA, Truetype, and even GIF because of patents, when it is painfully obvious that out of the 10 billion patents (or whatever huge number) out there, there are probably hundreds that are being used in GNU/Linux without anyone even knowing. There are probably pantents on clicking, on menus, on "listing files in a directory", and who knows what - we just never checked. Even worse, in the last decade, pantents started appearing that not only protect algorithms, but also compatibiliy. For example, you can't play an MP3 file without breaking patents (even if you write everything from scratch) and you can't show a Trutype font (in exactly the same way the designer intended) without breaking patents, and so on. Free Software traditionally tries to be compatible with existing software (Unix, Microsoft Windows, etc.) and by doing that, it is risking infringing on a lot of these "anti- compatibility" patents. It am quite sure that if Microsoft, IBM, or any other company with thousands of software patents, decided to check, they will be able to find their patents used in Linux or other free software. It's not that Free Software stole their idea - Free Software probably invented it independently, or even before them, or used it just to allow compatibilithy - but the American legal system doesn't care. The joke goes that a Jury is a group of 12 people which decide which side has a better lawer. The problem is, that this usually means who has more money. Last time around, we were lucky: the defendant was IBM, with deep pockets. What will we do next time, when the defendant is some small-potato free software project? -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Nov 22 2006, 1 Kislev 5767 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |When you lose, don't lose the lesson. http://nadav.harel.org.il | ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
