petit résumé des liens donnés pour ceux qui ne lisent pas tout
et rappelons que FUD est l'acronyme de : fear, uncertainty and doubt
I - un FUD ?
"My reaction is that so far, what he [Ballmer] said is just more FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt]," said Pamela Jones, editor of the Groklaw.net blog, which tracks legal issues in the open-source community. "Let him sue if he thinks he has a valid claim, and we'll see how well his customers like it."
Officials at Red Hat Inc., the leading Linux distributor, also dismissed Ballmer's comments. "We do not believe there is a need for or basis for the type of relationship defined in the Microsoft/Novell announcement," said Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/art ... geNumber=2Most people in the FLOSS community think Steve and Microsoft are FUDslinging, and have made it clear that any so called infringement charge wouldn’t stand up in court. Furthermore, Pamela Jones says Steve should actually TELL the community where the bits in the kernel that infringe actually are, because then we could get rid of them or work around them. (...) I’m sure lots of people will be willing to pick up a metaphorical scalpel and dig out the offending bit of code. I wouldn’t want to OWE you, Steve. I want to be free of any notion that I should be grateful and accountable to you. And I certainly don’t want you to own me, or any of the products that I use.
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Bridget KulakauskasII- L'interet d'un FUD pour MS : l'effet pervers des brevetsOnce again he demonstrates in my opinion how extremely broken the whole patent system around software is and how companies are trying to abuse that brokenness.
(...) In the Microsoft case they are not licensing something concrete for a specific amount of money. Instead they are basically saying 'we have a ticket of patents and we think a unquantified subset of them applies to you, pay a fee or you risk a lawsuit'. So if you want to do a risk assesment or try to work around these patents your only option is to dig through the global (primarily US) patent office databases for anything concerning Microsoft or companies bought by Microsoft and try to figure out if any of those patents apply to anything you do or have. The cost of such a move is probably prohibitive. Of course if you do find some patents which could apply to something you do, then the question of wether they should have been granted in the first place comes up. You then have the option to spend lots of money on trying to find prior art to invalidate the patent(s) in question. But the problem here is that most companies who do patent blackmail tend to make sure that their licensing fees are lower than the expected cost of getting their patents invalidated, so you are stuck in a lose/lose situation. You can give in to their crocked ways and license their patents no matter how bogus, or you can try to fight them and end up spending even more money. One could dream of a situation where the cost of any patent prior art research and litigation should be covered by the US patent office, as they are the ones who are primarily to blame for the current mess.
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Christian SchallerIII - L'inconnue Mono ou comment Novell met le zouk et laisse les autres se dépatouillerEn ce qui concerne « les technologies Microsoft en question », il s’agit surtout du projet Mono, qui vise à porter la plate-forme Dot Net sous Linux et dont les principaux dev sont employés par Novell (notamment Miguel de Icaza, l’homme à l’origine de GNOME et aujourd’hui de Mono).
Microsoft à fait du C# un standard afin de mieux le diffuser, et maintenant ils viennent râler, c’est du foutage du gueule…
Ce qui m’inquiète surtout, c’est le flou juridique concernant Mono, et je n’aime pas trop l’importance que prend celui-ci : en effet Mono fait maintenant partie intégrante de GNOME (avec Tomboy), mais aussi d’Ubuntu (F-Spot en plus), malgré la réticence de nombreux dev GNOME.
Il existe déjà des solutions alternatives à Mono, et pas des moindres : Java et Python en tête… je ne comprends vraiment pas cet engouement pour Mono :/
commentaire de billet
iciThere is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers. But we certainly have no intention of releasing the source code to .Net to the community, but the community is free to go with Mono and enhance that and build solutions for customers.
Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for server and toolsAvant cet accord, on savait qu'il y avait un risque juridique à utiliser Mono. Maintenant on en a la certitude, c'est écrit noir sur blanc. Novell créant un précédant en payant cette taxe, on peut être certain que MS va mettre toutes ses équipes juridiques pour faire passer à la caisse tous les autres éditeurs de distributions Linux et utilisateurs de Mono.
On peut espérer maintenant, que les têtes pensantes de GNOME reprennent leur esprit et vire fissa toute trace de Mono. Le développement du projet GNOME ne peut continuer avec le risque juridique établi que MS tombe à bras raccourcis sur les développeurs du projet et sur les utilisateurs, en particulier, PME/PMI, grands comptes et institutions gouvernementales.
Le projet GNOME n'avait rien a gagner à utiliser Mono, maintenant on sais avec certitude que l'on a tout à y perdre.
http://redfox.redfoxcenter.org/index.ph ... -microsoftI do not know of any patents which Mono infringes.
Although Novell provides most of the work to develop Mono, Mono is still a community project with many constituents and collaborators from companies, universities, governments and individuals, and as such we will continue to work and operate as a community project.
This means that we will continue to follow the rules that we have set for ourselves when it comes to patents:
The Mono strategy for dealing with these technologies is as follows: (1) work around the patent by using a different implementation technique that retains the API, but changes the mechanism; if that is not possible, we would (2) remove the pieces of code that were covered by those patents, and also (3) find prior art that would render the patent useless.
This is what we would have done before the agreement, and that is what we will continue to do.
Not providing a patented capability would weaken the interoperability, but it would still provide the free software / open source software community with good development tools, which is the primary reason for developing Mono.
We will continue to develop Mono under the same restrictions that we had before the agreement.
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Miguel de IcazaIV - Novell, un traître ?En fait, Novell qui jusqu'alors faisait front commun avec les autres acteurs du Libre sur le sujet des brevets, a préféré mettre ses propres intérêts et ceux de ses clients en avant, plutôt que de poursuivre sur la ligne communautaire. Une position dont il faudra voir à l'usage quel impact elle aura sur l'attitude des développeurs libres vis à vis de la firme, surtout si Novell conserve en interne certaines des technologies marquées du fer Microsoft.
http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actua ... 20933.htmlThe patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement (...)
the GPL makes it clear that all distributors of GPL'd software must stand together in the fight against software patents. Only by standing together do we stand a chance of defending against the peril represented by software patents. With this agreement Novell is attempting to destroy that unified defense, exchanging the long term interests of the entire Free Software community for a short term advantage for Novell ***spam*** their competitors (...)
Using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable.
http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/V - Un accord incompatible avec la licence GPL ?While we still don't have the legalese that covers the agreement, according to Matusow in a recent blog posting, "From the start, a design principle of the agreement was to be compatible with the GPL." (...)
Exactly how it does that remains in question, considering that Novell must pay a running royalty to Microsoft for use of its patents in SUSE Linux and avoid violating Section 7 of the GPL, which reads in part: "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2927608517.html
