Re: [ossig] MS against linux in Asia?

[nsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On 18 Nov 2004 at 13:07, SianLun Lau wrote:

> Hi all...
> 
> Problems might arise when we use Linux?
> 
> http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=HBPMOFPPHMA0UCRBAEKSFEY?type=technologyNews&storyID=6852759
> 
> SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. warned Asian governments on
> Thursday they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating
> system instead of its Windows software.

The Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) group did a patent review of the 
Linux kernel against US software patents and found that while no court 
validated software patent is infringed by it, there are about 283 issued 
but not validated patents which the kernel can potentially infringed.  
About a third of these 283 issued patents are owned by corporations, such 
as IBM, Novell and Red Hat, that are friendly to Linux.  However, 27 of 
these patents, belong to Microsoft.  For details on this see:
http://www.osriskmanagement.com/pdf_articles/linuxpatentpaper.pdf

Note that the threat of software patents against OSS is very real.  For 
example, see:
http://www.perens.com/Articles/Patents.html
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/09/1612239
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/10/12/software_patents_will_europe_roll/

Fortunately, as Ken noted, few countries recognise the validity of 
software patents at this point in time but it may change.  Software 
patents are recognised in the US and Japan and the EU is debating about 
this right now.  The recent withdrawal of support by Poland for the EU 
Software Patent Directive may stop its progress in EU for the time being.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041117192348200
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/poland_vote_against/

I suspect that vendors like Msoft will make full use of this potential 
threat of software patents to try and frighten off the adoption of OSS in 
general and Linux in particular by corporations.  Towards this end, it is 
important that countries continue to oppose software patents altogether 
especially developing countries since they have more to lose under the 
existing patenting mechanisms as they will have less to patent while in 
turn they will be hit by all sorts of patents (software or otherwise) 
which will hamper their development and access to technology.  More 
importantly the patent granting machinery worlwide should be pressured to 
get their acts together and keep up with the times.  They should 
understand IT-related innovations better so as not to arbitarily grant 
patents for broad and generic "software inventions".



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