Microsoft Patents Open-Source
Ben Kremer
In a move that today stunned industry observers, Microsoft Corp (MSFT) has
defused what is widely viewed as the biggest threat to its operating
system monopoly by patenting the Open Source movement.
Open Source is considered to be the biggest rival to monolithic
application and operating system development, methods epitomised by
Microsoft but used by almost all other major software companies with the
recent exception of Apple Computer (APPL). Instead of all work on a
computer program being done in-house by one company, which then jealously
guards the instructions needed to make it -- the "source code" -- the
Open Source movement freely distributes the source code with the programs.
It is there for anyone to examine, modify, tweak or, more importantly,
fix. "Bugs often take a while to be discovered, tracked down and then
fixed." said Raymond S. Eric, a leading light of the Open Source movement.
"Instead of waiting for the company, a user can simply fix it himself".
The user would be encouraged, though not forced, to make this change
available to others but cannot charge money for it. "The Open Source
concept has been proved in Linux, networking security and cryptography and
it looks set for the big time" said Mr Eric. But now, perhaps not.
Microsoft appears to have nimbly side-stepped this threat by a clever use
of intellectual property laws. In its patent, headed "Multi-Optional
Nodeless Open Protocol Outsourced Licensing Yield", Microsoft has laid
claim to a method for "program development by multiple authors given
almost unrestricted access to source, subject only to the necessary
conditions needed to self-support the enterprise". According to Microsoft
spokesman Mr A.C. Doyle, it is a perfectly legitimate application: "Well,
we knew we couldn't beat it, so we did a quick search of the USPTO [US
Patent & Trademark Office] database to see if anyone else had registered
it and when it was free, we thought 'sod it, it's as much of a 'process'
as any other in the decided cases', so we nabbed it, along with a couple
hundred other unclaimed things, like cold fusion, bottomless bit buckets
and a machine to recycle 'chad' '."
Microsoft also reportedly paid $10,000 to acquire the "opensource.org" and
"monopoly.com" domains, after sending around men in dark glasses to
convince the former owners of the inevit^H^H^H^H^H^H wisdom of this move.
The success of this initiative has spurred other efforts on the software
giant's behalf. Microsoft is also expecting final evaluation of its Boies
patent, which should end the long-running antitrust suit against it. The
patent, "Effective Methods of Cross-Examination by the Utilisation of
Contradictory Circumstantial Evidence", would mean that Microsoft would
own all means of asking embarrassing questions and showing up
inconsistencies by directly contradicting witnesses' testimony with their
own previous words.
"Microsoft is finally taking as much control of the courtroom as it does
of the desktop", said one observer, "although we hope they won't try to
make us use active channels in court". Said Mr Doyle: "If the patent is
approved, Mr Boies will now have to pay substantial licensing fees if he
wishes to continue pursuing us in court, or change his methods to avoid
infringing on it. Maybe he could stick to asking questions about the
weather or the great new features of Windows 2000". If the patent is
approved, there should also be no opposition to acquiring Mr Gates'
ultimate objective, the patent on "The Use of Metal or Paper Medium as
Currency", in which the Government would be forced either to use
Microsoft-minted currency for circulation in the economy, or license the
greenback. "We don't really want to get rid of our trusty old currency,
but the nifty little OEM code and holographic sticker should help the
treasury defeat counterfeiting, or money piracy as it would know be
known," said Doyle. However, he refused to be drawn on claims that the
licensing move might also require putting Bill Gates Jr's faces on all
banknotes, claiming that only the ones on the front of the banknote might
need to be replaced, perhaps in a compromise for putting Steve Balmer on
the 20 dollar note. The Governments of several African and European
countries are said already to have agreed, in principle, to start using
MS-Money(TM) instead of their own currencies, as part of a
Microsoft-sponsored equity for debt bail-out. But, as Mr Doyle conceded,
"we don't really know how popular the MS-Drachma or MS-Mark would be among
the populace".
--- Ben Kremer 1 April 1999
<benk#at#vislab.usyd.edu.au> http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd0672/
Copyright (c) 1999, Ben Kremer. All rights reserved.
lo...@my.sig
:)
The whole idea of an april fool is to make them believable, and thus fool
people with them...
That one's not going to fool anyone...
--
______________________________________________________________________________
|u5...@teach.cs.keele.ac.uk| |
| Andrew Halliwell | "The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't |
| Finallist in:- | suck is probably the day they start making |
| Computer science | vacuum cleaners" - Ernst Jan Plugge |
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Klaus Schilling
> You silly april fool you...
> :)
>
> The whole idea of an april fool is to make them believable, and thus fool
> people with them...
>
> That one's not going to fool anyone...
The thing from a few years ago with Gates sueing Santa was funnier.
Klaus Schilling
Barry Margolin
>You silly april fool you...
>:)
>
>The whole idea of an april fool is to make them believable, and thus fool
>people with them...
>
>That one's not going to fool anyone...
Sometimes funny is enough.
--
Barry Margolin, bar...@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.
Peter Seebach
Barry Margolin <bar...@bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>Sometimes funny is enough.
Well, it is for, say, rec.humor, but it's not the point of April Fools' day.
AFD is a modernized version of an ancient Pagan holiday, and it's *very*
important, spiritually, that you *actually* fool people. Just being silly
is disrespectful of the spirits of people who have been tricked into doing
stupid things and died.
-s
--
Copyright 1999, All rights reserved. Peter Seebach / se...@plethora.net
C/Unix wizard, Pro-commerce radical, Spam fighter. Boycott Spamazon!
Will work for interesting hardware. http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/
Visit my new ISP <URL:http://www.plethora.net/> --- More Net, Less Spam!
Barry Margolin
Peter Seebach <se...@plethora.net> wrote:
>In article <OoRM2.179$kM2.33262@burlma1-snr2>,
>Barry Margolin <bar...@bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>>Sometimes funny is enough.
>
>Well, it is for, say, rec.humor, but it's not the point of April Fools' day.
>AFD is a modernized version of an ancient Pagan holiday, and it's *very*
>important, spiritually, that you *actually* fool people. Just being silly
>is disrespectful of the spirits of people who have been tricked into doing
>stupid things and died.
I don't think I've ever been fooled by an April Fools Day Usenet posting or
RFC. Do you think RFC 2550 (about solving the Y10K problem) will really
fool anyone? Do you think anyone was seriously fooled by RFC 1097, Telnet
subliminal-message option or RFC 1149, Standard for the transmission of IP
datagrams on avian carriers (interestingly, the standard for transmission
of IP over Ethernet was also published on AFD -- did we actually go ahead
and implement that joke)?
The closest thing to a believable AFD post was the original kremvax
message. But in general, what we generally get are things that look
superficially like normal messages (press releases, RFCs in appropriate
layout, etc.) but when you actually read them the fake is usually pretty
obvious to anyone with half a clue. Joke RFC's are generally frowned upon,
but AFD is the one day a year when they're allowed (1991 actually had two
of them). If this is disrespectful, so be it.
I used to get my coworkers every year with an easy one: an email (or
announcement at a staff meeting if it happens to coincide with April 1)
that I'm leaving the group or company. It's plausible because it's so
simple, but certainly not interesting enough for posterity, like a good AFD
RFC.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
> The thing from a few years ago with Gates sueing Santa was funnier.
Don't know that one. Anyone re-post that please?
remove spam from e-mail address to reply
Morph
: You silly april fool you...
: :)
: The whole idea of an april fool is to make them believable, and thus fool
: people with them...
: That one's not going to fool anyone...
Had me fooled for all of 2 minutes, but then it wasnt April 1st when I read
it.
--
____________________________________________
If its not broke, bang it on the
floor untill it is broke, then try
to fix it while complaining that the
bloody thing never works properly.
Stephen Richards
www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Frontrow/5185/
u5...@teach.cs.keele.ac.uk
____________________________________________
Glen Turner
> I don't think I've ever been fooled by an April Fools Day Usenet
> posting or RFC.
I always liked KRE's RFC1924 on printing IPv6 addresses,
especially the dig at the speed of the IPv6 roll-out:
> 7. Implementation Issues
>
> Many current processors do not find 128 bit integer arithmetic, as
> required for this technique, a trivial operation. This is not
> considered a serious drawback in the representation, but a flaw of
> the processor designs.
>
> It may be expected that future processors will address this defect,
> quite possibly before any significant IPv6 deployment has been
> accomplished.
--
Glen Turner Network Specialist
Tel: (08) 8303 3936 Information Technology Services
Fax: (08) 8303 4400 The University of Adelaide 5005
Email: glen....@adelaide.edu.au South Australia