Microsoft prohibits GPLed work via licensing of CIFS standards

[Martin Keegan]

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):

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.

If you want free software only to run on old hardware, so be it. That's
not a world I want to live in.

> 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.

> 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?

Mk