slimboyfatboyslim a écrit :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
I know it's a bit off-topic, but here's a little follow-up. Excerpts from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1730114,00.asp (as seen on /.)
"Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does."
"There is no reason to believe that GNU/Linux has any greater risk of infringing patents than Windows, Unix-based or any other functionally similar operating system. Why? Because patents are infringed by specific structures that accomplish specific functionality"
"Patents don't care how the infringing article is distributed, be it under an open-source license, a proprietary license or not at all. Therefore, if a patent infringes on Linux, it probably also infringes on Unix, Windows, etc."
"Consider this—not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for patent infringement, much less been found to infringe. On the contrary, proprietary software, like Windows, is sued and found guilty of patent infringement quite frequently."
What follows had been discussed, but I'm just taking this opportunity to express it one more time. :-)
Its important to realise that PD is no more at risk than any other proprietary software; it would be a shame to consider PD as a bad choice for education, art or even commercial applications, because of M$ FUD.
It's a better choice to invest our collective expertise in PD than in any other proprietary alternative, even if PD would be infringing thousands of ridiculously obvious patents. The development model of free software is transparent, so it is already a good protection. Since nobody would make money suing a bunch of individual developpers, we're pretty safe. Our best protection in the long run is still to boycott companies who falsely claim that we could be acting illegally. As programmers and users of free software, those companies don't deserve the money we need to sustain the development model of free software.
Artists not involved in computer programming often believe that free software is only for programmers, and that proprietary software is for "non-technical" users like them; they should be aware that in lots of situations, if not most of them, they're better served by colleagues with programming skills than by any power user of proprietary software; most projects made with proprietary software tend to look and feel the same because they can't be easily customised to better fit each project. There's also a trend in all kind of artistic institutions that calls for collaboration with the "industry". Such costly collaborations are likely to profit the industry and a few artistic elites, not the free software programming and artistic communities.
There are technical, esthetic, ethical and political reasons to use and program free software for art purposes, despite all potential patent infringement risks. If the laws are bad, we can always change them; but unlike software, it takes much more time, so we better make the right ideological choices right now by using the right technical tools.
-- Marc