From: Rik van Riel (riel@conectiva.com.br)
Date: Fri Sep 01 2000 - 13:26:36 MDT
[Non-member submission]
On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Al Billings wrote:
> Rik wrote:
>
> > > CYMM SAYS: If MS were a real monopoly; it would be poor
> > > marketing. Now, with Open Source, this strategy seems to be
> > > plain stupid. "Intellectual property" as a concept has gone
> > > wayyy too far. The pendulum is about to swing the other way...
> > > it's a built in negative feedback loop.
> >
> > Except that they're using patent law (and trade secret law
> > extended to infinite patent law?) to try and remove open
> > source software from the marketplace.
>
> Who is? In what case?
There's for example the case of that "new" multimedia streaming
format Microsoft has (basically a bunch of old, standard, not
patented formats in a trivial wrapper).
That format is patented by Microsoft (don't ask me how, data
formats are not functional and as such not supposed to be
patentable) and Microsoft has used the patent to intimidate
one open source multimedia player into stopping supporting
that format... ;(
(unfortunately I forgot the names of both the multimedia
wrapper format and the player involved ... it was a while
ago and I'm really more a kernelspace person)
regards,
Rik
--
"What you're running that piece of shit Gnome?!?!"
-- Miguel de Icaza, UKUUG 2000
http://www.conectiva.com/ http://www.surriel.com/
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