Microsoft/Novell Partnership

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 08:36:10PM +0000, Peter P. wrote:

>It is extremely unlikely that any part of 'Linux' contains any Microsoft IP
>since it has BSD Unix and U.C.Berkeley etc ancestry. Also anything GPL embraced
>and extended and republished with another license is going to place the GNU
>legal wing into battle position.

While what you write *should* be true, I can guarantee that it is not.
Searching the USPTO for Microsoft and "memory" yields 27000+ hits, and
that is in ISSUED patents.  The USPTO are abject morons, but they call
the shots, and it will take thousands of lawyer-years and billions, if
not hundreds of billions of dollars to sort it all out.  The bars of
"non-obviousness" and "prior art" are willfully ignored.  Look at the
abstract for this patent, for instance, issued this Hallowe'en:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=19&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=microsoft&s2=memory&OS=microsoft+AND+memory&RS=microsoft+AND+memory

Patents are the enemy of free software, and they may yet win.  I can
easily imagine a day when I am only able to run free software behind
hardened firewalls because it is illegal to own or run it.
-- 

yours,

William

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