On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 09:20:39PM +0100, Martin Keegan wrote:
On Sat, 6 Apr 2002, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
Why do we care about those patents at all? I agree that the USA is an
It's not the patents (the Ethernet patents have been great for free software), it's the licensing. Intellectual Property law (copyrights, patents, etc) says Microsoft can license the patents and its copyrighted work as it wants to. Competition law says otherwise.
I'll tell you why we should care about this (namely the action by Microsoft which occasioned this thread):
The action of Microsoft shows that we are going to good way, we are really a big threat to them and that's nice. We only have to be sure we can continue and win the war.
This action is an attempt to hurt Samba. Samba is critical to the wider acceptance of free software. If they can't get Samba as part of the package, many users won't choose a free system, they'll chose a proprietary system. The fewer users there are, the smaller the resistance will be to attempts to lock down the hardware so free software won't run on it.
But the actual patent license doesn't matter much AFAICS. Yes, this is something wrong, but I think we can work around it at least.
important part of the world, but it isn't *the* world. We don't have patents in Europe and hopefully never get them. This means patents
This is simply false.
I mean software patents and they aren't legal in Europe AFAIK.
aren't a problem for all developers in non-USA world. You have the freedom to redistributie the program, only in some countries where the people don't have freedom you can't. (Countries like the USA, Irak,
Are you from a country which has the European Copyright Directive, or is within the territory of the European Patent Office?
Yes, I know of the bad things happening at the moment. However, I don't see how the patents of microsoft harm me.
Jeroen Dekkers