[ale] Segue from MS threatening the community

Jeff Lightner jlightner at water.com
Tue May 15 14:46:13 EDT 2007


I remember back when Lotus was successfully winning "copyright" suits
over "look and feel" against others who were making spreadsheet
products.   Somewhere along the way they lost out (probably to MS-Excel
which even has an option for Lotus 123 menus).   M$ didn't get huge in
word processing over word perfect because they were the best or in
spreadsheets over Lotus for that reason - they got their through
"patently" monopolistic practices.

 

M$ has a long history of bullying people to get its way so this really
shouldn't come as a surprise.  What it does however is bespeak the
success of Linux by showing how worried they are now.  

 

This is what comes of W dropping the anti-trust case against M$ when his
admin took office.  M$ thumbs their noses at EU court decisions and
continues business as unusual in the U.S. 

 

Of course M$ will not actually sue the companies selling Linux and OSS -
they'll find a few big corporations (but not so big they can fight back
easily) to make examples of for using it.

 

All the above of course being my own not so humble opinion.

________________________________

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Rev.
To: ale at ale.org
Johnny Healey
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2007 1:24 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Segue from MS threatening the community

 

Virtually anything can be patented in the US, including the user
interface.  One-Click is a good example of this; you don't need to see
the source code to know that the patent has been violated.

On 5/15/07, Thompson Freeman <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net > wrote:


All the harrumphing and such about MS announcing patent
infringement leads me to a question which should be asked 
of a lawyer, but I'll ask it here. How do you show patent
infringement by software without the source code?

Ok. That marks me as legally simple minded, but I am
curious about the concept.

Thanks for the bandwidth 
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...




More information about the Ale mailing list