Re: ``Nothing like a monopoly to get investors to cheer youon''

[Sujal Shah <sujal@worldnet.att.net>]

The threat of patents is a real one.  Unfortunately for Microsoft, not
all OSS developers live in the United States. :-).  Many a BSD and Linux
programmer live in foreign countries, especially in Europe.  The nice
thing about Europe is that algorithms are not patentable, nor are
network protocols (because they do nothing to improve the quality of the
information stored in them.  They're just storage algorithms).

EU Patent law considers computer code and algorithms to be mathematical
functions/objects, which are not patentable (just like chemical formulas
are not patentable in the U.S.).  THe only exception, AFAIK, is code
which fundamentally improves the information that passes through it. 
For example, an algorithm which takes a picture and sharpens it in a
unique and different way to allow a person to gain more information from
a given image.  Please don't take my interpretation as a given, as I'm
not a lawyer, and I know little about EU law, but I found this info on
the web via a Slashdot article referencing something abotu the
Fraunhofer patent dispute (over MP3).  If you're interested, I would
recommend heading to the web and checking it out.

Microsoft will be hard pressed to patent any of these things in Europe,
and there will be developers there who will RE the stuff.

On the other hand, I don't know how the WIPO work will change this.....

Sujal


Charles Behney wrote:
> 
> What effect will Mac OS X and Gateway Amiga Lazarus OS have, with POSIX/Linux
> and BSD available as extensions? Is there a shift towards protecting the public
> protocols from the 'extend and embrace' attack? It appears that the next killer
> apps could be Windows killers, and the Halloween documents are a battle plan for
> subverting the open standards, as a response.
> 
> Ironically, the study of herbal medicines is retarded because no one company can
> patent a natural plant's extracts, and no patents can be derived.
> 
> Jini/javatone is another threat being answered with a Wintone clone. I see lots
> of storm clouds for MS, but I read today that the Windows 2000 will have
> patented file servers that will not be reverse engineered by the OSS community.
> The threat of a legal trap by MS could be the beginning of their battle to
> control and de-commoditize protocols through the courts. Ironic and sad, but not
> without some hope. I never thought the details of their dirty error messages
> would become front page news, so there could be more surprises to come. Have you
> had any requests for your program that displays the 3.1 error message from
> investigators or other journalists?
> 
> CAB
> 
> Brett Glass wrote:
> 
> > At 10:27 PM 11/7/98 -0500, Charles Behney wrote:
> >
> > >Wall Street loves a Sure Thing. How can you make Linux a darling of stock
> > >analysts?
> >
> > I don't know. However, Linux may (inadvertently) make Microsoft MORE
> > of a darling of stock analysts. Why? Because Linux will prevent any new
> > commercial operating system -- such as BeOS -- from being able to compete
> > with Microsoft's offerings. Linux will compete with them for developer
> > mindshare, for sales, and for capital. The result: Microsoft's position
> > as the ONLY viable commercial option will -- perversely -- be strengthened.
> > Linux will kill off potential competition for it.
> >
> > --Brett

-- 
------ Sujal Shah ---- sujal@worldnet.att.net

       http://home.att.net/~sujal/
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