Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 8th Nov 2007 17:33 UTC, submitted by WillM
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Member since:
2005-07-24
"""
I believe this is incorrect. The BSDs went through something similar in the early 90s.
"""
No. And this is an *extremely* important point to understand. The BSD lawsuit was about copyrights. The threats OSS faces today are about patents. That is a *completely* different scenario. One cannot simply rewrite sections of code to avoid infrindements. Whereas copyrights are about copying lines of code, patents are about implementing *ideas*. If we are found to be infringing, for the sake of argument, upon a patent which covers having a pointing indicator on the screen which one can control with ones hand, we cannot simply rewrite the code. We must stop using mouse pointers altogether and find a completely different way of interacting with the desktop.
Being called into question on copyrights is, at worst, a major inconvenience. Being found to violate certain patents could be absolutely *devastating*.
What is protecting us now is not necessarily that we are not infringing upon any patents, but that for various reasons, few actual players in the industry, short of pure-play patent trolls, dare to use their patents offensively.
If patent armageddon were, in fact, unleashed some day, OSS would be just a devastated as the closed source companies. Worse, perhaps, since other than Novell, we don't have much, if any, in the way of cross-licensing deals, and are not in a position to make them in order to save our skins.