Strategy (was Re: Improving copyright)

[Niall Douglas]

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On 16 May 2004 at 17:03, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:

> > companies could throw their software patents in a mutually owned
> > holding company. If any of the members gets sued for patent
> > infringement, the full weight of all the other patents is used to
> > countersue and each member agrees to contribute their share of the
> > legal costs.
> 
> Lawyer heaven.

True, but use of lawyers is a sign of insecurity. And insecurity in 
the west is growing rapidly - it's a malaise.

> > Right now it'd hurt MS more than help it to kill Linux. Why? Because
> > for anti-trust reasons MS needs a competitor to point at and say
> > "we're not a monopoly look!". It's exactly why Intel tolerates AMD,
> > in fact has even quietly helped it out when it looked about to fold
> > a few years back.
> 
> Oh, but Microsoft has healthy, friendly and cooperative competition!
> Didn't you see how they even settled out of ourt with Sun? So that
> they can "compete" with "open" standards... So they aren't a monopoly,
> right?
> 
> And this isn't a matter of monopoly vs competition, it's a matter of
> those anti-property lunatics, they wan't to shatter the economy and
> drive innovation away!
> 
> Besides, EU's very fond of competition, they even said that Microsoft
> must license with RAND their protocols...
> 
> Now seriously, you haven't learned doublespeak yet?

I think I understand how MS knows that perception is everything. Anti-
trust investigations are begun not from some checklist which is 
ticked off but entirely by *political* decision. Thus MS gets anti-
trusted by Clinton but let off under Bush.

Politicians also work almost entirely by perception. If they are 
perceived to not be doing enough about something (even if they are), 
bad things happen. Therefore it doesn't matter a jot how MS treats 
others so long as it doesn't APPEAR to be behaving in an anti-
competitive manner.

This is why in previous posts to Jeroen I stressed the need to spread 
the IDEALS, the way of thinking of the free software movement. Actual 
free software itself is far less important. If you make Linux all 
singing all dancing but if MS is still raking in billions a year 
exploiting the users, then as far as I am concerned Linux has 
achieved *nothing*.

Cheers,
Niall





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