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:2005-11-11
//Don't patents apply whether you reverse engineer it or not, depending on what the patent owner says?//
Yes they do.
The MS "IP" in question is not, however, patented. They are trade secrets.
In order to have a valid patent, MS must fully publish exactly how the format or protocol works. If they do that, they can get patent protection for 20 years on that exact method.
Microsoft have not published anywhere exactly how their NTFS filesystem works. It is a trade secret.
Therefore, MS have no patent on NTFS.
Similar story for the networking protocol that Samba reverse-engineers.
Member since:2005-07-17
generally patents are quite easy to reverse engineer, unless it is something that can only be done one way. "meatspace" patent disputes are generally quite entertaining. Company A accuses Company B of infringement, blueprints are produced to court by company A, then company B typically goes back to court with design changes that are different enough and often qualify as a new patent themselves.
Software patents shortcut the whole give and take because companies are allowed to only provide the "idea" and not the actual source code... in meatspace things like Amazon's 1 click patent would be unenforceable, there would be hundreds of copies all using different pieces to perform the task.. when courts try to adjust these cases there's nothing to go on, and that's deliberate by the patent office sloppiness and lawyer's cleverness at broad patents.
Member since:
2006-01-04
Don't patents apply whether you reverse engineer it or not, depending on what the patent owner says? Is it not the DMCA that has reverse engineering for platform compatibility allowances?