[DMCA-Activists] Re: [Patents] Re: IBM, Microsoft, BEA Snub W3C

[Xavi Drudis Ferran]

El Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 09:54:19PM -0400, Russell McOrmond deia:
> (I received this on address@hidden, and suspect that only that forum 
> will receive my reply given I am not a member of the others)
> 
> On Sat, 19 Apr 2003, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> > I wonder if what we are seeing is an attempt to create a
> > patent-restricted standard.  If so, perhaps public pressure
> > is called for now.
> 

I'm sorry if I'm too Europe centric, but I beg to differ.
As long as corporates want to have patent encumbered so called "standards"
they're going to find or build organisations to sanction them, and we 
won't be able to stop them by boicotting or mail bombing them. We 
got some relief in W3C just to find corporates going elsewhere, specially
to more opaque forums. It can go on until "standards" are developed in 
an absolute secretive way between oligopolists. It is very important to 
have W3C able to develop real standards in an open way, but we won't 
be able to stop all organisations from allowing RAND.

Public pressure should concentrate in legislators anywhere where there 
is a bit of democracy left and software patents are legal or may become legal.
Of course RMS is already doing it, but I believe people should be encouraged
to demand from their legislators that they don't allow such a destruction 
of a creative culture and needed business as software. 

Protesting against those who have economical interest in destroying their 
market (by monopolising it) and no obligation to listen to protesters 
is wasting time compared with protesting to elected legislators and publicizing 
the issues.

>   It should be remembered that this is not the only standard that is part
> of OASIS, with the Open Office technical committee being very important to
> our community. 
> http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office
> 
>   We need to look at this not as a single standard that may become an
> issue, but try to bring whatever pressure we can onto all software
> standards bodies to not accept royalty-bearing or "field of use"
> restricted patented methods.
> 

An important note, yes. But again, this proves that pressure should go to 
governemnts, not unaccountable standard bodies. Does anyone knoe why OASIS
was chosen?. Maybe we do need some more open standard bodies, if the W3C
is too web-centric, but we can't hope to avoid RAND bodies.

>   I tried to have a conversation with an IBM person at a recent government
> conference that featured some FLOSS presentations(*), and he simply didn't
> get it. There is a misconception that patents can not be used defensively
> against other patents if they are RF licensed, and this misconception
> needs to be cleared up.  Anyone wanting to use RAND (or worse) licensing
> are doing so because they want to use them for offensive purposes, not
> defensive purposes, and this fact needs to be made clear.
> 

Well, a patent is not much better just because you use it defensively:
a- it can be used offensively later when budgets go low or anything
b- defensive use means barriers to entry for those who can't afford the defense

>   While what Microsoft is doing with software patents makes sense given
> their clear dependency on legacy business models, what IBM is doing is
> sitting on the fence by both supporting Free Software (such as Linux) and
> opposing Free Software (via RAND software patents) at the same time.  I
> often surprise customers when I recommend against purchases from IBM until
> I explain IBM's position on software patents.
> 

I don't know what their plans are, and I've heard someone from IBM 
who also seemed not to know (although he pretended to know). But I'm starting
to doubt they are not aware of the contradiction. Any explanation I imagine
sounds like conspiracy theory or something (let's overthrow MS by flocking with
everyone else and joining efforts in free software while we retain control of 
the whole lot of software by software patents, that we will be able to use once
we don't depend in MS to become the new monopolist, this time enforced by the 
states' patent laws), so I don't have a plausible explanation. Note that 
there's an
IBM free license which seems to prevent that scenario, so who knows?




-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
address@hidden