Microsoft/Novell Partnership

[Peter P.]

John Macdonald <john at ...> writes:
 
> > 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.

Nobody cuts out the US. The way I see it, if there is a patent on a method in
the US then that is THE method to be used for that purpose in said country. The
issue of circumventing a patent by writing code around it is sort of defeating
the purpose. The purpose of the protectionism is to promote local industry. In
fact, the differences in the US patent systems appeared when congress mandated
the USPTO to make changes in its patent application process to promote US
industry and business by easing the patenting process (and thus dropping some
tests). And it did just that (successfully, from their point of view, but not
from everyone else's imho). As a developer, one uses said patented technologies
inside the US and pays royalties, passing the cost on to users. And telling them
why. Protectionism is not a technology or engineering issue, whether it's about
soft lumber, electricity, water, or software patents (or passports at the border
and biometric id requirements), it is a political issue that must be resolved by
voters at the polls and legislators imho.

In other words, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, but when not, then don't if
you don't like it.
 
> 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.

Microsoft is not the problem, the different legal system is. Microsoft and other
companies just use the system as good as they can. There is no point in accusing
them of this. The point is to see what makes this possible there, and impossible
elsewhere.

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

The idea of being able to sue someone for damages for something that he has
obtained through legal channels in good faith is somewhat alien to me, it is in
the same class as Sippenhaft is. At worst there can be an injunction on the
resale of the product (or if it is physical it could be confiscated and
destroyed, see under counterfeit goods). But you can't take a pair of suspected
counterfeit jeans off of someone on the street and just burn them (the jeans)
because one party claims they are counterfeit and convinced a judge about it,
and you can't stop people from travelling abroad to buy said jeans and come back
wearing them. Just as an example.
 
> 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.

Yes but the choice was made by the US legislators when they decided to have a
system that is different from everywhere else's, at the instigation of powerful
local industry lobbies. So the choice was already made for one. As a vendor, the
only choice you can make is whether to do business there or not.
 
> 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.

Of course not. But when they have to, then they do just that. Recently there
were problems with Linux BIOS not being available outside the US and patents on
RTLinux extensions. And this is neither the first nor the last time. Again, this
is not a technology question, it is a nation-wide problem that also spans
telecom, electronics and brand and trademark names. Even books are affected. The
only way to solve it is at the polls.
 
> > As to who fights whom, I think that in a democracy there should be three or 
> That's where the largest amount of money is.  Which just drives
> the argument that you can't just ignore the U.S. market.

Nobody ignores the US, it's just that it's a 'different' place to work with. You
know, they have been inching their way towards the metric system, and all that.
And I think that finding strange ways to circumvent patents for the purpose of
avoiding what has been placed there (protectionism) to fleece the customers
better is a hack, just like US pensioners buying prescription drugs in Canadian
pharmacies until their state legislated that the Canadian drugs were 'unsafe'
(but especially cheaper than local ones), and stopped that (I shudder whenever I
remember a certain text from the US referring to sick people who need to buy
medicine and long term care to stay alive as 'health customers').

Peter


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