Microsoft/Novell Partnership

[John Macdonald]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 07:59:55PM +0000, Peter P. wrote:
> John Macdonald <john at ...> writes:
> 
> > 
> > On Sun, Nov 05, 2006 at 09:17:26AM +0000, Peter P. wrote:
> >
> > > This paragraph is slightly confusing  Could you please rephrase it a little ?
> > 
> > If a company sends you a legal notice that you are infringing on
> > their patent, the notice will describe the conceptual process and
> > results you are carrying out and achieving.  It will not matter
> > whether you were allowed to copy the code - it is duplicating
> > the patented process without a license that is the violation.
> > So, whether your code is covered by GPL, derived from the original
> > Bell Labs release code, or whatever does not affect that you are
> > breaching the patent.  (It might help you in your course of
> > proving that the patent is invalid; but in the mean time you may
> > received an injunction that forces you to stop selling your
> > product for a while.)
> 
> Yes but if the company is in the US and the user is elsewhere and the disputed
> patent is a software patent, then no injunction can be sent, no ?

That's fine for you for the moment, but if a company wants to
make some money using Open Source, the U.S. is a huge chunk of
their potential market.  Cutting out the U.S. removes a lot
of the profitability potential - which reduces the number of
businesses that are funding developers, etc.

Microsoft is not concerned about whether you can get free
software in Canada at the moment, just in drying up the most
profitable chunk of the market for the long term.

> ... 
> > A patent would mean there were chunks of functionality that
> > could not be deliver to U.S. users of any distribution.  If the
> > component involved was sufficiently critical, people would
> > spend time working around the patent; but if the work-around
> > was too costly (either making things too slow, or reducing
> > functionality significantly), there would be a fork for the
> > rest of the world's users who would not want to pay the cost
> > for a legal issue that didn't affect them.  That leaves lots of
> > developers spending time developing two versions of the code -
> > taking more than twice as much time to do that portion of the
> > development.  This would leave MS laughing in the background
> > the way they did back in the days when there were lots of
> > Unix vendors who did a better job of fighting each other than
> > in fighting MS (or the way we've been able to laugh about MS
> > being forced to make special distributions for regions that
> > flex their anti-trust laws sufficiently).
> 
> But free OSS software has most of the value in after-installation setup and
> services, no ? So why do two versions, losing twice the money, so they can be
> supported equally after that ? In a way the US patent law as it is now in this
> context (software patents), is a form of protectionism. They sort of force NIH
> methods out by allowing the patenting of underlying (often obvious, in the
> mathematical sense) principles, as opposed to patenting the implementation (the
> IH in the NIH).

There is no value in the after-market if your customers can
be sued for getting into the market in the first place.

As a vendor, if you're going to make money in the U.S., you
have to have a version that won't be stripped from your shelves
with a court order.  If you're going to make money anywhere
else, you have to have a version that is not crippled.  So,
you either have two versions, or choose which market you are
going to limit yourself to.

As a developer, there are still the same two markets.  The Linux
development team is not going to make a non-U.S. only version of
the kernel, nor would they want to just throw away functionality
that is useful everywhere else in the world.

> As to who fights whom, I think that in a democracy there should be three or 
> more parties. When there aren't, it is not a democracy anymore.
> 
> The point is that most 'interesting' (my subjective take) software development
> and most of the hard work in programming is being done by IT professionals who
> do not (yet) have US citizenship yet often work in or for US companies. This is
> a little strange, no ?

That's where the largest amount of money is.  Which just drives
the argument that you can't just ignore the U.S. market.

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