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MySQL AB Counter Sues NuSphere for GPL Violation

MySQL AB Counter Sues NuSphere for GPL Violation [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Published August 2, 2001By Vince Kimball

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Microsoft files and gets lots of patents. Last week for the first time they said they will use patents to limit competition. That means if you produce software that uses some technique that Microsoft has patented, they'll either make you take the feature out or send you a bill.

Now suppose you're an open source developer, doing it for love, not money. They're going to shut you down. Let's say you're a small commercial developer trying to prove an idea so you can get funding. Yup, you're out of the game too. Maybe you're IBM with a huge hoard of cash and patents. No problem. You pay the bill or trade patents. As Microsoft's reps acknowledged last week, there's no room in their plan for independent developers. In their vision of the software ecosystem, you have to get a job working at a BigCo if you want to make software.

Of course the USPTO should never have allowed patenting of software, it's too close to patenting speech, and that's the first sacred freedom guaranteed by the US Constitution. I think ultimately that's how we'll get rid of this problem. (BTW, in general, lawyers have been of no help on this. I've tried to get Lessig to look at this angle, but I don't think he understands how close software is to speech.)

Tim O'Reilly pointed out that Microsoft has benefited from a lot of non-patented art that it ripped off, citing the Macintosh as an example. It's much worse than that. I designed features of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Windows file system browser. My lawyers suggested that we file a patent on these inventions, but I felt then as I feel now that it is unethical for a software developer to try to prevent competition that way. I let Microsoft use the ideas for free because I thought it was better for progress in the software business. (In 1985, when the outlining feature was going into Word, they didn't hide that they were studying ThinkTank and Ready. The subject of licensing the design of our user interface never came up in the discussions we had with them, and we didn't raise the issue after Word-with-outlining shipped. Same with PowerPoint, which eventually adopted many of the features of MORE. I had a meeting with Microsoft's Pete Higgins where I explained how outlining would work in spreadsheets. Shortly thereafter the feature appeared in Excel. Again, no problem sharing the idea, I didn't have a spreadsheet to put it into, they did, so I gave them the idea. The same free sharing of ideas happened in 1998-2000 when we worked with them on SOAP, based on prior work at both Microsoft and UserLand. Getting Microsoft on board was important. We made a significant contribution to their product strategy.)

BTW, I asked John Montgomery of Microsoft, while SOAP was in development, to confirm that they had not filed any patents on this technology, and I got confirmation that they hadn't. The red flag was raised by Sun, in a private meeting, who claimed that they knew that Microsoft had filed patents in this area. The BigCo's play a pretty nasty game, I learned at the time. [Scripting News

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