On Thursday, 12 April 2012 at 13:36:41 UTC, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
On 04/10/2012 12:06 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
A curious fact is that the FP fans have much to thank to
Microsoft, as
it is the company with more FP research on their paychecks.
Many open
source fans are not aware that a few of the main developers in
the Ocaml
and Haskell communities, work for Microsoft Research labs.
I don't see any reason to thank Microsoft for this so much as
to be wary of it. The same people that were getting paid to
work on this stuff at universities in Europe, where software
patents don't exist, are now getting paid to work at Microsoft,
where patenting software is expected as part of the job.
Microsoft has also in recent years been very aggressive with
their patent portfolio, rattling their saber at Linux and suing
Android distributors.
And yet IBM still is the number one champion in patents.
Or just, because they play nice most of the time with open source
they are excused?
Patents are bad, regardless which company makes use of them.
