… but all I can think about when I see things like this and this is ‘where is the patent grant?’ Not that a patent grant is always a necessity before implementing a technology, but it is nice, and does seem particularly useful when one is potentially making oneself a much bigger target for a company who is using the media to threaten your users with patent infringement suits.
9 thoughts on “I know I have a one-track mind…”
Comments are closed.
– Sep 5, 2007 Murat Ugur EMINOGLU: Harddisk ve CPU sıcaklıklarını kontrol etmek için ufak bir script – Sep 5, 2007 Hrishikesh Ballal: Show me the summer. – Sep 5, 2007Luis Villa: I know I have a one-track mind… – Sep 5, 2007
So? They innovated by investing, they deserve to get something back for it. Without that there wouldn’t be the ribbon UI at all. (I browsed through those three later examples of “prior art”, they are not alike at all as they are not really context sensitive)
[Ed.: I took out the trollish part.]
Microsoft can choose to do whatever they want. But given the choices they appear to have made, implementing those technologies seems foolhardy, and suggesting that those implementations are somehow open or free seems (at best) deceptive.
Where are those suggestions? In the minds of the people that see Novell doing all that (wonderful) stuff because they likely do have a permission for that. Slightly nasty in a way, but it isn’t anything new. The same has happened and will, on other areas and with other technologies.
Well, according to Miguel:
http://groups.google.com/group/tiraniaorg-blog-comments/browse_thread/thread/2a07b8b50038d8c8/2429b33859cf05c0#2429b33859cf05c0
> Will I have to suffer
> the shadow of Microsoft patents over Silverlight when using or
> developing Moonlight?
Not as long as you get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.
Mark: ah, very nice link. Thanks.
[…] 10 minutes after I posted yesterday, I found a great picture that I wanted to use to illustrate the post, but I’d already posted […]
That link is where Miguel also writes: “OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been
FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that
there is something fundamentally wrong with it. This is at a time when
OOXML as a spec is in much better shape than any other spec on that
space.”
Does anybody actually listen to that guy anymore? It doesn’t really matter that you started GNOME (but hey, thanks!), if you start selling out at every opportunity later.
Not sure where Miguel becomes the official word of Microsoft there… I’m with Luis on his original post – there is a very odd line in the sand here and it just takes one wave to wipe it off the beach… if Silverlight implemented open, unencumbered standards – fine – but it doesn’t. Microsoft proactively chose to recreate what other standards already did just to get it’s own .NET / XAML implementation that will never have a “green light” for use in ways Microsoft does not officially grant. This is a step backwards (or two) b/c Moonlight puts a blanket of security over a ticking bomb. This will be no different than all the other codecs issues…