[Patents] Re: July 24th Open Source Summit at O'Reilly Conference

[nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson)]

Dave sent this to attendees of the July 24th Open Source Summit at the 
O'Reilly Open Source Conference in San Diego.  FSB'ers might want to
read it as well.
-russ

Dave Winer writes:
 > Good morning!
 > 
 > Yesterday I got an email from Brian Behlendorf, CTO at Collabnet and
 > president of the Apache Foundation, in response to a DaveNet piece [1] that
 > talked briefly about the open source summit last Tuesday.
 > 
 > In that piece I said "We can work with Microsoft. Looking back over the 
 > last
 > few years, most of the time our collaboration has been open, productive and
 > fair. They listened, we did too, and we developed some new interesting
 > software. There is a precedent for fair competition. Let's make the most of
 > that."
 > 
 > Brian said: "I agree we can work with Microsoft, but sometimes they put
 > terms on the relationships that just make that impossible.  I was glad I 
 > was
 > about to get Mundie to state "of course!" when I asked if they had patents
 > they planned to enforce against independent implementors of .Net and
 > Hailstorm.  It's amazing how perfectly they craft their offering such
 > that those who raise the more serious issues about them came off sounding
 > like paranoid lunatics, and when the predictions of those "lunatics" come
 > true (as in, "MS will use their monopoly on the desktop to create a new
 > monopoly on the Internet") people will just write it off with a "who could
 > have known? they probably earned it anyways" set of comments.  While that
 > debate on Thursday's panel (if you saw it, if not, there's video on
 > technetcast.ddj.com) made MS come out looking more reasonable than the open
 > source folks, I think people are even more aware now of some of the deep
 > issues their proposed new architectures present."
 > 
 > That prompted me to watch the video [2] of the debate from last Thursday in
 > San Diego.
 > 
 > Now I've been in the "ecosystem" defined by Microsoft and the companies 
 > they
 > subsumed for over 20 years, and I've never seen them be this bold, nor 
 > stoop
 > to such a low level. The patent threat that Behlendorf mentions was
 > confirmed by Mundie and Stutz. It's changing my thinking about the road
 > ahead. It's going to be a lot rougher than I thought.
 > 
 > My only advice is to use your mind, stay centered on what you believe and
 > state it clearly. There is no consistency to what Microsoft says. There's 
 > no
 > point, imho, in arguing with them, or trying to show them anything. On one
 > hand they complain about interdiction by government, say they depend on
 > developers, and stand for innovation; all while they're releasing bits of
 > source code under very restrictive terms, and openly saying that they will
 > use patents to limit competition. They're smart enough to know that they're
 > being inconsistent, so any debate with them isn't going to get them to say
 > "Oh I see, we made a mistake, we'll fix it." That's not what this is about.
 > 
 > On Tuesday at the summit I said that Microsoft will likely be a victim of
 > patents, not an abuser of patents. I must retract that now, I see something
 > has changed, for the worse. I do not recommend working with Microsoft until
 > their position on patents changes.
 > 
 > Dave
 > 
 > [1] http://davenet.userland.com/2001/07/27/a10CabRideApart
 > [2] http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=592
 > 
 > 
 >