Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on February 01, 2005 01:45 AM
According to <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20050130#looking_back_on_commodities" title="sun.com">Jonathan Schwartz</a sun.com>, those <A HREF="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6209575.WKU.&OS=PN/6209575&RS=PN/6209575" title="uspto.gov">IBM patents</a uspto.gov> aren't all they appear - looks like they added a load of irrelevant ones just to bring the numbers up, and they're all old and about to expire. Exactly how is the GPL community helped by a patent on tamper-proof screws? At least Sun's patents are the ones you need to make derivative works from OpenSolaris under the OSI-approved CDDL.
As usual, IBM played the community and won good publicity and Sun did the right thing and gets slammed by people like Stallman who don't look past the words and the dogma to see the reality.
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IBM Patents Full of Filler
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 01, 2005 01:45 AMAccording to <A HREF="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20050130#looking_back_on_commodities" title="sun.com">Jonathan Schwartz</a sun.com>, those <A HREF="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6209575.WKU.&OS=PN/6209575&RS=PN/6209575" title="uspto.gov">IBM patents</a uspto.gov> aren't all they appear - looks like they added a load of irrelevant ones just to bring the numbers up, and they're all old and about to expire. Exactly how is the GPL community helped by a patent on tamper-proof screws? At least Sun's patents are the ones you need to make derivative works from OpenSolaris under the OSI-approved CDDL.
As usual, IBM played the community and won good publicity and Sun did the right thing and gets slammed by people like Stallman who don't look past the words and the dogma to see the reality.
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