Microsoft settles in whiteboard patent dustup

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I'll tackle these.

"Oops, that's right, there isn't such a thing. True, it's a small issue at the moment, unless you happen to run Linux and want to stay legal of course. But the fact of the matter is that with out a LEGAL license to the technology there will never be a LEGAL open source DVD player."

And this is an issue in the corporate environment how?

In the home environment, sure. It's an issue. DVD players in Linux have NOT been declared illegal, nor do most of them specifically use deCSS, the program being attacked in the courts. But since the legal issues are still murky, all of the distributions currently do not ship a DVD player capable of playing encrypted DVDs, except for LindowsOS, which bought a license to do so.

I'm not sure what your issue with this is. The Linux sellers are acting perfectly responsibly in this matter. In fact, I'd go so far as to say they're erring on the side of caution, because none of the DVD players in Linux capable of playing encrypted DVDs are currently considered illegal. And it's doubtful the patents in question will stand. But even if they somehow do, I fail to see how this will stand in the way of Linux in the office.

"How about access to MS Office documents that have DRM enabled? To my knowledge there is absolutely no way for open source (OpenOffice) to import or use these documents. Note that other for profits can and do license the technology to build their interface with these documents."

This one's easy. The APIs for DRM are open. If you've got a Windows DRM server in your environment, it's trivial to implement a method for authenticating against it in Linux. And you don't need to violate a patent to do it, otherwise developers on Windows wouldn't be able to, either. Number two is shot down, I'm afraid.

But who uses DRM? No one wants it, no one uses it. So gee, if Open Office fails to implement a feature no one wants or uses, where's their loss?

"How about Windows WMA and WMV file formats for multimedia? Or even Apples QuickTime format. Again, many, many for profits license the technology for encoding and streaming, but open source can not."

If you're going to stream a Microsoft format, why would you choose to do so from a non-Microsoft server? And as far as playback is concerned, media players in Linux now support Quicktime, WMV, DivX, xvid, and dozens of other codecs. All without violating any related patents, because in the cases of WMV and Quicktime, freely distributed files from Microsoft and Apple are used for the playback. The media players just hook into them. The files that Microsoft and Apple created are doing the actual work.

The fact is, these days the playback experience on Linux is a heck of a lot better than on Windows. I've got one media player that handles ALL those codecs, no problem. That's number three.

Now, none of this should imply that I feel software patents are a good thing. I think the patent office needs a serious overhaul and needs to stop handing out software patents completely until it's been fixed.

Posted by: Damon K   Posted on: 12/28/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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