[GRLUG] Linus: "Microsoft Hated is a Disease"

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:52 AM, <peyeps at iserv.net> wrote:
> I kind of got disappointed with Microsoft when they decided to sue Tom Tom.
>
> They seem to be trying very hard to keep people from interfacing with
> their operating system, except under their very limited, controlled,
> revenue extracting conditions.
>
> If they had released the VFat patent to open source, instead of suing Tom
> Tom, I might trust them with Mono and running Linux on top of Windows.

Technically, patents are already "open source."  The idea behind the
patent system is to publicly document a design in such a way that it's
freely usable after the period of exclusivity is up.

If you meant "indemnify", well, that's a tricky thing; As far as I
know, there's no way to provide a legally binding guarantee that you
won't sue someone for violating your patent without signing a contract
with them.  That's called a "license", regardless of the terms of the
contract and any compensation identified.

The crux of the matter is that in order to grant a license to "open
source", you would have to sign a contract between you and "open
source", which requires "open source"* to be legally authorized to
represent all open source developers.  Which requires those developers
to be have signed a contract with "open source" to grant that
authorization.

Except that Open Source is not a legal entity so much as a concept,
and you still have the problem of getting the developers to sign a
legally binding contract with that entity, anyway.

The other option is to destroy release the patent to *everyone*--which
removes the patent's primary value these days; The megacorp world
exists in a state of cold war, where the ballistic missiles are the
courts, and the warheads are the patents.  IBM, Microsoft, HP, Lenovo,
Apple et al all have massive patent portfolios with the understanding
that it's extremely likely that they're each violating a few of the
others'--if only because it's impossible to rigorously  prove that
you're not.

* Sorry for for all the quotes; It's a tricky subject to speak precisely about.

> (Why run Linux on Windows escapes me, but some people want to do it.)
> Personally running Windows on Linux makes more sense.

I run Cygwin on my workstation because I can't stand cmd.exe.  I run
Windows on the bare metal of my workstation because writing
high-performance C++ apps on Windows is part of my job.

I just run Linux at home.

>
> My personal goal is it doesn't matter which operating system you use, the
> program you run should be the same for the end user.

Is the operating system not a program, then?  You're taking your
hatred of the monopoly at the operating system level and advocating
that everyone one One True Program for each thing you do at the
desktop level.  Would you advocate that everyone run Firefox?  Or that
everyone run a particular window manager?  Or that everyone use KDE
over GNOME?

If that didn't seem absurd, consider that the moment you mandate that
Something be done Some Particular Way, you close the door on Something
being improved and varied on--the same problem we run into today with
patents.  Sure, it's convenient to have some piece of the system that
hasn't changed in twenty years; Everyone knows it, everyone knows how
to use it.  That doesn't, however, mean that you need to keep doing it
that way.

When you mandate that Something be done some Particular Way, you
create an environment where everything subsequently developed that
depends on being able to have Something done is constrained by the
limitations of that Particular Way, and the results aren't going to be
as clever, useful or innovative as they could be otherwise.

Unless the mandate expires, the constraints of doing Something that
Particular Way will continue to stifle alternative approaches until
nobody wants to do Something at all, and people drop Something in
favor of Something Else.


-- 
:wq