Microsoft prohibits GPLed work via licensing of CIFS standards

[Jeroen Dekkers]

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
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