[News] Microsoft Still Shamelessly Patents Other People's Ideas
Roy Schestowitz
Hash: SHA1
Microsoft nicks another man's patents
,----[ Quote ]
| SOFTWARE MONOPOLIST Microsoft seems to be
| patenting stuff like crazy.
|
| Volish employees Samuel Chow Radakovitz,
| Adam Michael Buerman, Anupam Garg, Matthew
| John Androski, Matthew Kevin Becker and
| Brian Ruble apparently had a brillian
| insight one morning and got patent
| 20090282325.
`----
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1562851/microsoft-nicks-patents
Re Here we Go Again
,----[ Quote ]
| As I read it, Microsoft have obtained the
| patent on Sudo itself but they have also
| added, or propose to add a GUI.
|
| Either way, surely Sudo is protected by the
| GNU licence and prior art. Bolting on a GUI
| must, for sure, be an infringement of the
| licence. That is unless they continue to
| licence under the GNU.
|
| Why do Microsoft want Sudo anyway, that's
| an interesting question.
`----
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/talkback/0,1000001161,39877957-39001068c-20105424o,00.htm
Chinese Court Rules Against Microsoft In IP Case
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/chinese-court-rules-against-microsoft-in-ip-case-2504
Internet Governance Forum 2009 - II
,----[ Quote ]
| As the head of the Jordan Open Source
| Association I have also asked with others,
| about the openness and royalty-free policy
| of the foundation. We got very assuring
| answers as well as plans to promote open
| content by the foundation, Stephane Boyera
| wrote:
|
| Another key discussion was around
| intellectual property, and the
| importance of open source and free
| content, not only at the tools level,
| but also in the different materials and
| tools developed by the thousands of
| projects in the field. This is an area
| we will surely investigate further.
`----
http://jordanopensource.org/blog/internet-governance-forum-2009-ii
Recent:
MS patent looks just like Unix command, critics howl
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft's patent comes as the US Supreme
| Court wrestles with the issue of business
| methods, such as those included in software,
| and whether they qualify for patent
| protection. Critics contend only physical
| inventions should be eligible, while a large
| swath of technology companies maintain that
| software-driven features such as Amazon's
| one-click checkout and Priceline's reverse
| auctions are fair game.
`----
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/12/microsoft_patents_sudo/
Did Microsoft just patent sudo?
,----[ Quote ]
| 1985, huh? And when did this Microsoft patent happen? It was filed in
| 2000. Well gee, that doesn't make sense. How'd they get the patent?
| It certainly falls under the category of "obvious" if there's prior
| art such as sudo.
|
| What makes this whole thing funny, though, is something I saw a couple
| days ago. Head over to Builder-AU and listen to Peter Watson from
| Microsoft. He says,
|
| "User Account Control is a great idea and strategically
| a direction that sort of all operating systems and all technology
| should be heading down"
|
| Excuse me? Does he really believe this is all Microsoft's great new
| idea?
|
| In the end, this seems like a patent that Microsoft will hold up and
| say "we have a patent and Linux is violating it!" They won't ever
| sue on it though (just leave the threat hanging to scare away
| potential users), because then they could have the patent revoked.
| It's better for them to just wave it around.
`----
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com/2007/05/did-microsoft-just-patent-sudo.html
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Ian Hilliard
Both KDE and Gnome have sudo with a GUI. The US patent office must
clearly have no clue as to the patentability of concepts for which they
are issuing patents. Even worst than that, they then help support the
companies that have received patents that should never have been issued.
For me, this is the core of the problem with software patents as they
currently exist.
Ian
Roy Schestowitz
Hash: SHA1
____/ Ian Hilliard on Sunday 22 Nov 2009 20:46 : \____
> Both KDE and Gnome have sudo with a GUI. The US patent office must
> clearly have no clue as to the patentability of concepts for which they
> are issuing patents. Even worst than that, they then help support the
> companies that have received patents that should never have been issued.
>
> For me, this is the core of the problem with software patents as they
> currently exist.
They just make more money if they approver everything, with exceptions:
Patent That: Reporter Invents Way to Reach PTO Director
"Journalists who cover Washington know the drill: top bureaucrats can be very
hard to get through to, especially when you need to reach them the most.
"So when ABA Journal senior writer Terry Carter got nowhere in his recent effort
to reach Patent and Trademark Office director David Kappos through spokesman
Peter Pappas for a story he was writing, he decided on a characteristically
novel approach: on Tuesday he drafted and posted a humorous patent application
for a "method to get an interview with USPTO Director David Kappos." Edward
Adams, editor and publisher of the ABA Journal, wrote in this story at the
Journal Web site, "We figured the problem was that Carter was not speaking the
agency's language."
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2009/11/patent-that-reporter-finds-novel-way-
to-reach-pto-head.html
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | $> wget -r -erobots=off http://www.*
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http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project
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Tim Smith
Ian Hilliard <nos...@hilliardtech.com> wrote:
> Both KDE and Gnome have sudo with a GUI. The US patent office must
> clearly have no clue as to the patentability of concepts for which they
> are issuing patents. Even worst than that, they then help support the
You should try looking at "news" sources other than BN. If you looked at
actual news sources, you'd know that what Microsoft is trying to patent
has little to do with sudo or the GNOME/KDE front ends for it. The
initial sensationalistic stories were quickly refuted, and even the
maintainer of sudo blogged about how the Microsoft patent application
was for something quite different. BN, of course, doesn't bother to
cover those developments, as they don't fit in with its FUD agenda.
--
--Tim Smith
JEDIDIAH
>
>
> In article <4b09...@news.x-privat.org>,
> Ian Hilliard <nos...@hilliardtech.com> wrote:
>> Both KDE and Gnome have sudo with a GUI. The US patent office must
>> clearly have no clue as to the patentability of concepts for which they
>> are issuing patents. Even worst than that, they then help support the
>
> You should try looking at "news" sources other than BN. If you looked at
> actual news sources, you'd know that what Microsoft is trying to patent
> has little to do with sudo or the GNOME/KDE front ends for it. The
...what Microsoft is trying to patent is the conceptual equivalent. It is
what a Windows version of gksudo would need to be with the addition of one
little extra bit that's hardly inventive.
> initial sensationalistic stories were quickly refuted, and even the
> maintainer of sudo blogged about how the Microsoft patent application
> was for something quite different. BN, of course, doesn't bother to
> cover those developments, as they don't fit in with its FUD agenda.
--
Oracle... can't live with it... |||
/ | \
can't just replace it with postgres...
Erik Funkenbusch
>> You should try looking at "news" sources other than BN. If you looked at
>> actual news sources, you'd know that what Microsoft is trying to patent
>> has little to do with sudo or the GNOME/KDE front ends for it. The
>
> ...what Microsoft is trying to patent is the conceptual equivalent. It is
> what a Windows version of gksudo would need to be with the addition of one
> little extra bit that's hardly inventive.
Really? Of course you know better then the actual maintainer of sudo, who
says something it's something totally different.
You really are a genius.
Chris Ahlstrom
How come you bastards never offer up a quote and link?
Lazy? Or slippery?
--
You prefer the company of the opposite sex, but are well liked by your own.
Peter Köhlmann
Both.
But Erik is /somewhat/ (to small enough values of "somewhat") correct. It
is not /really/ sudo, it is policykit which does the very same thing.
And policykit is used since some years in several linux distros...
Policykit is basically a boilerplate/blueprint for that MS-patent.
All the more reason for MS to try to throw monkey wrenches
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolicyKit
--
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend: and inside a dog,
it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx
JEDIDIAH
...quite so.
This nonsense is total hearsay. This sudo guy is obviously not here
to defend himself or keep his words from being misrepresented. OTOH, the
trolls can't even be bothered to repeat the relevant argument or quote
the bit of text that's supposed to be contradictory.
It doesn't take a "genuis" to have a conceptual grasp of sudo.
THAT is rather the whole point of this shenanigan.
Microsoft is not attempting to patent any sort of "genius".
--
Apple: Because if it's not Quicktime, then it's pirated. |||
/ | \
Roy Schestowitz
Hash: SHA1
____/ JEDIDIAH on Tuesday 24 Nov 2009 15:07 : \____
Microsoft just wants to increase patent count so that it can
intimidate/extort rivals without undoing the kimono.
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Yea, tho I walk thru the valley of the shadow of clues, I shall fear no
luser, for Thou lart with me, Thy chicken and Thy manual, they comfort me.
- -- Dave Aronson
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Erik Funkenbusch
>>> Really? Of course you know better then the actual maintainer of sudo,
>>> who says it's something totally different.
>>>
>>> You really are a genius.
>>
>> How come you bastards never offer up a quote and link?
>>
>> Lazy? Or slippery?
>>
> Both.
> But Erik is /somewhat/ (to small enough values of "somewhat") correct. It
> is not /really/ sudo, it is policykit which does the very same thing.
PolicyKit does not do the very same thing, as your own link states.
"In contrast to systems such as sudo, it does not grant root permission to
an entire process, but rather allows a finer level of control of
centralized system policy"
Indeed, PolicyKit seems similar.
> And policykit is used since some years in several linux distros...
Since Fedora 8, which is November 2007. The changelog goes back to March,
2006, which places the very first checkin of PolicyKit about 1 year after
Microsoft showed the first betas of their version of this sort of code.
> Policykit is basically a boilerplate/blueprint for that MS-patent.
> All the more reason for MS to try to throw monkey wrenches
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolicyKit
This appears to be a case of Linux copying Windows, with Windows being the
prior art.
Erik Funkenbusch
What's more, Microsoft filed their patent in 2000, 6 years before PolicyKit
existed.
Erik Funkenbusch
Why bother? You will just claim you don't want to read it anyways...
But in any event, try this:
" To clarify the matter, sudo maintainer Todd Miller posted a statement on
the sudo mailing list explaining the difference."
"I've already received a number of questions about US patent 7,617,530 that
some people seem to believe might cover sudo. I don't think that is the
case," he wrote. "Sudo simply doesn't work this way. When a command is run
via sudo the user is actively running the command as a different user. What
is described in the patent is a mechanism whereby an application or the
operating system detects that an action needs to be run with increased
privileges and automatically prompts the user with a list of potential
users that have the appropriate privilege level to perform the task."
"Although the patent doesn't cover sudo, it's worth noting that the
specific elements that it describes are indeed found in the graphical
interface of PolicyKit, a relatively modern Linux framework for privilege
escalation. PolicyKit was developed after the Microsoft patent was filed,
meaning that it doesn't constitute prior art."
Chris Ahlstrom
> Why bother? You will just claim you don't want to read it anyways...
What a cry baby. Like I said, it depends on the organization hosting the
link. You trolls sure whine a lot.
> But in any event, try this:
>
> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/microsofts-psuedo-sudo-patent-doesnt-really-cover-sudo.ars
>
> " To clarify the matter, sudo maintainer Todd Miller posted a statement on
> the sudo mailing list explaining the difference."
>
> "I've already received a number of questions about US patent 7,617,530 that
> some people seem to believe might cover sudo. I don't think that is the
> case," he wrote. "Sudo simply doesn't work this way. When a command is run
> via sudo the user is actively running the command as a different user. What
> is described in the patent is a mechanism whereby an application or the
> operating system detects that an action needs to be run with increased
> privileges and automatically prompts the user with a list of potential
> users that have the appropriate privilege level to perform the task."
>
> "Although the patent doesn't cover sudo, it's worth noting that the
> specific elements that it describes are indeed found in the graphical
> interface of PolicyKit, a relatively modern Linux framework for privilege
> escalation. PolicyKit was developed after the Microsoft patent was filed,
> meaning that it doesn't constitute prior art."
Thanks, man. It's nice to deal with you on a grown-up level for a change.
--
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
JEDIDIAH
...which is splitting hairs really since this is exactly what happens on any Linux
distribution that makes extensive use of sudo and it's graphical variants.
In the worst case you can describe the automated variant as...
if (!authorized()) { run_gui_sudo() };
So we're once again back to the essential question of "what's the invention" and
how this is something more than Microsoft seeking to make it "illegal" for
programmers to use their own skills to solve the same problem in the future.
Is it the automation? Is the the enumeration of possible users? Is it the selection
of the user with the lowest level of priveledge? Is it the idea to use the user with
the lowest level of priveledge (common Unix policy)? Is it the mechanism of extracting
the necessary information from the Windows security subsystem?
Or are they just being handed a patent for "the idea of a mousetrap".
--
Apple: Because only pirates are power users. |||
/ | \
Erik Funkenbusch
> ...which is splitting hairs really since this is exactly what happens on any Linux
> distribution that makes extensive use of sudo and it's graphical variants.
No, it's not.
> In the worst case you can describe the automated variant as...
>
> if (!authorized()) { run_gui_sudo() };
No. This requires the App to know about this, and to call the correct
functionality. The patent is for a system that automatically detects when
an app tries to do something it's unauthorized for.
> So we're once again back to the essential question of "what's the invention" and
> how this is something more than Microsoft seeking to make it "illegal" for
> programmers to use their own skills to solve the same problem in the future.
The invention is not what you think it is.