In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property. In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."
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Member since:2006-01-10
Member since:2006-06-09
no, because of the patents. well, it's legal in europe for example.
IANAL and VERY roughly, patents are there to protect ideas, or, "software ideas" in that case.
patents are an unfair system to protect innovation, else people could just copy and sell what was your original idea (that's why patents expire too, after a while, when you gained from your ideas, everyone is free to use it)
that's why europe voted against it for software, because it destroy more than it gives. people start patenting anything, browser, windows, icons, etc => no more competitivity
Member since:2006-06-16
Member since:2006-02-17
Well, yeah, the Linux implementations of NTFS and FAT/VFAT support are sort of reverse-engineered. In Linux, of course, the implementation is far different, so it's the physical format of the data on disk that's the only part that is the same.
MS may assert that even though the physical format of data on the disk is not claimed explicitly in their patents, it is implied. That is not likely to stick. Further their patents quite explicitly indicate that they are patenting a method for implementing FOR WINDOWS functionality that was already prevalent elsewhere (long filenames, for instance). Linux isn't attempting to provide this functionality to Windows.
Member since:2006-01-04
Member since:2006-03-15
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2006-01-04
VFAT/FAT32 is apparently partially patented (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT32 if you trust WP..)