On 14/08/09 11:03, David King wrote: > All software patents are bad. Although there might be a short term > benefit for software like OpenOffice, if businesses think they cannot > buy MS Word, or they literally cannot buy it, or they have it but are > afraid to use it now, then they might go for OpenOffice.
Software patents in general suck. The problem is largely US centric. It doesn't - currently - impact the EU or most of the rest of the world. > As OpenOffice is given away free, I doubt that i4i would try to sue for > any use of XML in OpenOffice. They could happily go after Sun/Oracle who own the copyright to OOo but ODF (the native file format for OOo), from what I have understood, does not infringe this particular patent. In fact it was a major issue with IS29500 (OOXML) and one of several serious criticisms of the "standard". > But if this dents MS Office sales and gets more people using OpenOffice > then it might have a positive benefit, although I expect MS will settle > and sales of MS Office will continue. MS will almost certainly win/wriggle out of this. But in general terms this whole thing is *bad*. It elevates the perception that one can patent ideas that are not terribly novel or innovative. It does not help FOSS in the slightest. > It is also kind of ironic, given that MS threatened to sue the open > source software community for undisclosed infringements on its patents. > Maybe they need a taste of their own medicine. Perhaps, but MS threatened certain vendors of Linux, not the community per se. Redhat is their main target but they have stood their ground and made a good case so far; unlike the cowards/desperados like Xandros and Novell. > The best result would be for everyone to move to patent-free software, > and just make everything open source, which is probably something that > Microsoft is still strongly opposed to, as their business model demands > profits from sales rather than from support. I disagree. Making *everything* open source would be pyrrhic panacea. Competition is good. Competition is what has spurned the FOSS movement and proprietary vendors alike. Trying to eradicate the proprietary market is unrealistic and would stifle innovation. Al -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
