Ubuntu Founder Says Microsoft Not A Big Threat 128
Golygydd Max writes "Who says that Microsoft and open source developers are enemies? It's not Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. He says that Microsoft is not the patent threat Linux and open source developers should be worried about, and that the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years. 'He said the most dangerous litigants are companies not themselves in the software business, small ventures or holding companies that get their principal revenue from patent licensing. He singled out former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, which is stockpiling patents at a rate that alarms large companies such as IBM and HP, as an example of such a potentially dangerous company.'"
Re:Lobbyists (Score:5, Interesting)
Chances of Microsoft using other's patents (Score:2, Interesting)
In-fact, if Microsoft really had a points in-which Linux kernel infringements Microsoft's patents, they would have show the exact spots in which the code were using Microsoft's patents.
but, Microsoft's code is closed, and more then probably they are using IBM's or any other standard OS thinking patents and that will be disclosured in the near - future in which Microsoft will have to pay explanations to Linux community and everybody else in the computing area.
Who had lost from all this story? Novell which declared the coward and the Linux community ashamed of doing business with.
Re:Reform the System (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lobbyists (Score:3, Interesting)
Those new laws or whatever legistlation won't be protecting us. Rather, I suspect that the government will keep Microsoft out of court in exchange for agreements not to leverage their own patent portfolio against other American companies, leading to an eventual federalization of the patent system. American companies will be able to use american technologies however they wish, and instead of defending it against against foreign interests (a futile proposition in reality), the new PIAA (Patent Industry Association of America) will trade American tech for stuf like common credits and world bank debt. Mark my words, 10 years, max.
come up with ideas, do initial work-patent pool (Score:5, Interesting)
There are lots and lots of creative folks that work with GNU, Linux, *BSD, and who read Slashdot. It would be great if there was an open invention process whereby one could take an idea, do the basic stuff, then submit it to the OSDL (or another reputable group) who would get the patent in your name, but assigned to them.
Such a process would reduce the barrier to entry for getting patents on truly new ideas. (I would have a dozen or more if my employers had filed for patents on some of my ideas.) It would also allow you to have your name on a patent which looks great on a resume (finally something that is actually worth something to the inventor). But, most importantly it would expand the pool of patents available for open source and remove additional ideas, concepts, and inventions further out of the reaches of the patent-only law firms.
This should be a call to action!
Re:Reform the System (Score:5, Interesting)
The term of our patents was set in an era when sending a message from one city to another took days, or if it was separated by an ocean, weeks (potentially months). The flow of information moved at a completely different pace. Ten years then would have been a very brief time in which to bring a product to market. In today's world, I think it would be about 12-18 months: just enough to give the patentee a slight advantage over the rest of the marketplace, but not enough for them to amass an arsenal of patents with which to destroy all competition.
Now, perhaps there's something to be said for somewhat longer patents on pharmaceuticals, because of the long government-mandated review process that they have to go through, before they can become profitable (and which mandate disclosure of the ingredients, meaning that keeping it a trade secret isn't an option). However, I think this should clearly be the exception rather than the rule.
A patent length of a year -- five or at most ten for pharmaceuticals -- non-renewable, would do wonders towards improving competition and the production of new ideas in the technology sector. (While we're at it, lets have a 20-year copyright span, too.) Unfortunately I think by the time the major players come around to realizing that the system is hurting more than it's helping, the U.S. will be increasingly irrelevant.
Re:Reform the System (Score:5, Interesting)
I've explained this before. I used to work for the US government many years ago. Look at it from Uncle Sam's perspective.
1) The patent office makes money. A lot of it. Unlike other government agencies who consume tax dollars, the patent office makes a profit. Profit = good. Why would you "reform" an agency who is making you a ton of money and thus make less money?
2) Businesses have yet to scream en masse that patent reform = a good thing. Until Microsoft and IBM and Cisco and Intel and lots of Fortune 500 companies say "The system is hurting us and costing us more money than you are making under the current system. A reform would actually bring you more money." then it will never happen.
3) Government bureaucrats are outstandingly good at protecting their own turf. Expect patent office mangement to fight tooth and nail against reforms.
4) The government is convinced that this is win-win for everyone because it's like Mutual Assured Destruction. Everyone has patents, so nobody will use them unfairly. Unfortunately, the reality is that Shuttlesworth is right. The company everyone should fear is the company that has nothing but patents, like the guys who went after BlackBerry.
5) Most people in Congress are lawyers. Most lawyers like patents. It provides easy work for other lawyers on both the "infringing" companies and the IP holders doing the suing. If everybody is being sued, lawyers have lots of work and earn lots of money. Win-win!
Patent Trolls (Score:3, Interesting)
These guys are the Osama Bin Laden of the patent system.
Shuttleworth is right. Companies with this business model are a far more serious patent threat than Microsoft.
Intellectual Property should not be transferable (Score:4, Interesting)
This means, that IP should be useless to those who do not create or otherwise use their inventions. IP should be useless to those who do not benefit from the arts created. If this sort of reform were to happen, we'd see an end to patent trolls because they would have to actually MAKE something that uses the patents in question, not simply license or sell the patents to other parties. (Licensing is okay, but the ownership of a patent should never be salable.) Song writers and musicians should never be allowed to sell their copyrights, but instead force the recording and media companies to bargain with them for each item they wish to distribute. This would force fair prices and values to be paid to the artists out there and prevent them from essentially being enslaved by the labels out there.
IP should have its value, but it should never be salable. And because it's salable, we have this ridiculous, abusive and litigious condition we have today. All of humanity would be the better if we could get rid of the salability of IP. The benefits of everything from life-saving drugs to works of art would eventually fall upon humanity and would give direct and arguably more bountiful benefit to the ACTUAL creators of IP.
Oh yeah... and reduce the limits on IP back to their original terms or less... This lifetime+70 years and 100 years for a corporation is simply ridiculous.
Re:Reform the System (Score:5, Interesting)
The best way I can think to do this is to require a business plan to be filed with the patent, and the two go hand in hand. The business plan then determines the basic term granted for that specific patent, and is limited by allowing the patentee to recoup costs and some percentage of profit above and beyond that (e.g. you spend $100K to develop the patent, and then you get to make $150K guaranteed by the granting of the patent). Additionally, by putting a review board in (comprised of members from SEC and IRS) to review the business plans on a periodic basis (e.g. annually, ever other year, etc.) the term can then be lengthened or shortened to meet the industry based on the performance of the patent.
This would allow high cost patents (e.g. drugs) to be around for a long time, while low cost patents (e.g. software patents) would go away quickly. Additionally, if the cost was low enough the patent would not be granted as it would be recouped before the patent was granted.
Patent trolls would also go out of business as they would not be able to submit business plans that would qualify, and be exposed for what they are.
So this is a real win-win if adopted. (BTW, I would get rid of the USPTO and replace it with a new organization that had arms in the IRS and SEC to do the job. A lot of the information required is already filed with the IRS and SEC, and if anything would only require a little more documentation in the files as some stuff might have to be further broken down. Point is, it's already there.)
Re:Reform the System (Score:2, Interesting)
As for patent length in pharmaceuticals, it takes 10 years and 80 million dollars to get a drug from inception through the FDA approval process, so a 5 or 10 year patent length is simply too short. The clock starts ticking when the patent is filed, not when the drug is approved. There has to be some ability for the companies to get a return on their investment otherwise there will be no new drugs.
Re:Reform the System (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, the PTO was pushing hard for some sort of change, as the obviousness standard is a major swamp of litigation for them. Patent examiners also are frustrated at the lack of options available for patent application rejections. Besides, currently the office can't expand fast enough to put a dent in the backlog and it's starting to make them look bad. A reduction in the recent explosion of patent filings would only be good for them. It's not like any examiners are going to be laid off patent filings rapidly decrease. Just put on a hiring freeze and let their atrocious retention rate do all the work.
Unfortunately, you have a lot of people who have gone to school, taken bar exams, and made a very profitable career over prosecuting patents, and they've got some powerful friends in congress.
Try this 2004 survey done through SourceForge (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.ostg.com/bcg/ [ostg.com]
About 2000 lead developers of the top SourceForge projects were surveyed. 30% responded. Of those 30% said they made money while creating open source projects. The top two motivators for open source were "intellectual stimulation" (i.e., fun) and "skill improvement" (i.e., training).
So...I'd say my basic premise holds: people often use open source projects to practice their skills for their non-open source "day jobs".
Re:Reform the System (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, we've licensed a scheduler-planner algorithm (it's a trade secret and not patented), it's VERY hard (reference implementation is about 500kb of C++ code) and it took several years for the company to develop. It certainly is not one-click-buy type of algorithm.
Unfortunately, such algorithms are exceedingly rare.
Re:Uh oh. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Reform the System (Score:3, Interesting)
Since the major source of delays in the pharmaceutical industry seem directly tied to the FDA approval process, maybe the solution is to somehow tie the patent process and the FDA approval together; e.g., if you file a patent application and then file for FDA approval, the patent clock can "stop ticking" until the FDA makes a decision one way or the other. Basically, make the time that the drug spends in the approval process not count towards the patent's span, or only have the clock start ticking once approval goes through (just issue them on a provisional basis to drugs not-yet-approved).
Or maybe more directly -- you could just say that no company can use research done by another company in order to get its own drug approved, for ten years. That way, a generic drug maker can't just wait for some company to spend the billions pushing a drug to market, and then ride the coattails of the approval and start making generics; they'd have to get it approved based on completely independent research, as if it was a new and totally different drug, or wait a few years in order to be able to use the first company's research and approvals.
Re:Lobbyists (Score:5, Interesting)
This is only one of the numerous examples of how the patent system has impeded innovation and has mostly made a mess of things. Another shining example was the airplane. Most of the basic patents in the US were held by either the Wright Brothers or Glen Curtiss. The Wrights and Curtiss despised one another and engaged in a decade of pointless and expensive legal wrangling. Aircraft makers were unsure what to license from whom and often couldn't negotiate terms. The result was that when World War I came along, the US was far behind Europe in aircraft technology even though the airplane was invented in the US. In order to get the US back into the aircraft business before the huns or turks or whoever started bombing New York, a patent pool was established and litigation was put on hold. Thankfully it was not reinstated after the war.
Y'know what. We got along just fine without software patents for 20 years. I think we could do so again. I'd go further than that, and (carefully) dismantle the entire damn Patent system. It's pointless, doesn't -- so far as I can see -- encourage innovation, and doesn't even work very well. We've got enough problems with global warming, overpopulation, incompetent and mendacious leaders, corporations run amock, etc, etc, etc. Why go out of our way to create more?
Re:Reform the System (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reform the System (Score:5, Interesting)
Reality is that it is business and patent trolls that are fighting against patent reform. Even the USPTO has recognized a problem and been trying to reform some, and even Congress has been doing work towards that too. That's how we got the public peer reviews of patents going. So, yes, it is all about money, but it is more about whose money. Patents make a lot of money for a lot of people, gov't and business included; and until businsses get in line and say we need reform (which is starting to happen), then only have the stakeholders involved are for it, and the other half are against it and pay for the elections of the other half.
Re:Reform the System (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mark spoke at our conference last week... (Score:3, Interesting)
Your argument that people invent to secure patents is completely bogus. People invent because it's the only way to create market advantage, and that's the only way to make money. There are a few exceptions, cases where patents have stopped the small inventor from being crushed by big competitors. These exceptions are so rare, and so proportionally unimportant that they are really insufficient to justify the whole patent system.
Promoting disclosure, yes the patent system should in theory do this. Promoting invention, that's complete and utter bollocks.
Agriculture, where no patents have applied, has managed to eliminate famine since the 1950's. Not one single famine due to failure of the agricultural system. (Only due to war, natural disaster, politics.)
Pharmaceutics, heavily protected by patents, has failed to stop mass death and sickness from preventable diseases, has failed to promote invention in the areas where it's most needed - malaria, dengue fever, etc. etc. - and has failed to create a competitive market. It's succeeded in creating cartels and monopolies of the worst kind.