On Tue, May 21, 2002 at 04:11:24AM -0700, Jim Lynch wrote: > > This project needs a backbone. > > OK. Hire the lawyers necessary to support the claims you're making > rather than suggest that debian should just go ahead and break the > law without thinking. It looks like every one of these patents you've > mentioned have prior art. The backboney thing to do is get those patents > recinded, all of them. BTW, maybe the symlink patent could stand up > if microsoft owns unix and unix invented symlinks... you would need art > prior to unix. If Debian needs a lawyer to determine that something like a patent on RLE or a Save-As feature are bogus and not worth worrying about, then we should all leave the project now since we can't get anything done whatsoever. I can find patents which the Linux, BSD, and HURD kernels all violate if I try. Hell, Microsoft has a patent on SYMLINKS! Either Debian must decide that these things are bull and ignore them or it must cease to be. Those are the only two options available to us. These patents are ridiculous and meaningless. The holders of these patents know it, and they don't actually enforce them because they realize how stupid it would be and how easily prior art could be proven if necessary. They simply use these silly patents when they're threatened or need to license other silly patents. It's a form of legalized extortion in which corporations find that it is easier to strike a deal than take the chance that the other corporation may not be bluffing and risk losing a court case. These patents are patently ridiculous and every single person on this list with half a brain knows it. Now if you will all kindly develop the other half of your brain and make the logical connection that these things are a complete non-threat, we can all get back to making Debian a good operating system. Or we can continue jumping at shadows until someone gives us a patent number which makes apt a patent violation (it exists) or the same for the kernel itself (also likely to be an easy search..) When I joined Debian, RSA was patented and this could have severely hurt our ability to even sign our uploads. What did Debian do about this? Well, RSA was patented in the US - so we had a server outside the US with RSA on it. Two versions in fact. The first was for use in the US (and should never have been allowed outside the US. How did it get there? Well, we didn't care! It was there and we got hold of it, that was enough...) Sure RSA was patented, but we didn't let that get in the way of Debian. Today, if RSA were patented and someone posted an ITP for PGP 2.x, it would go into a list of packages which cannot be made because of the RSA patent. Debian has become cowardly. And any backlash toward me for saying so is directly related to the fact that others refuse to admit the truth. We no longer try to fight these things passively or otherwise. We have given up as a project. The patent holders have won because we've lost the will to work around their patents. > (btw... is anyone besides me wondering what could happen if microsoft > buys redhat (and therefore cygnus and arsdigita)? Now that redhat is > publically traded, it could happen) I know what would happen. First things first, gcc would fork. But Debian would immediately go into a panic and need to have some company donate lawyer services to help the project figure out what if any impact this would have on our ability to use gcc for compiling Debian. If you think I'm exxagerating things a bit, I think you haven't been reading the lists very closely. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> Now I'll take over the world <Dr^Nick> SGI_Multitexture is bad voodoo now <Dr^Nick> ARB is good voodoo <witten> no, voodoo rush is bad voodoo :)
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