Microsoft to Patent .NET

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

(Forwarded from DotGNU Developers list.  Slashdot and CNet
articles, other texts pasted below, including the text from
an internal link, for a code-obfuscation project sponsored
by Microsoft.  This impacts many things, but our front line
on this one is at DotGNU.  -- Seth)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [DotGNU]Microsoft Applies For .NET Patent
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 14:27:51 +1100
From: James Mc Parlane <james@massive.com.au>
To: DotGNU <developers@dotgnu.org>


> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/11/0048208&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=155

> http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='20030028685'.PGNR.&OS=DN/20030028685&RS=DN/20030028685

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----

> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/11/0048208&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=155

Posted by timothy on Monday February 10, @09:56PM

from the my-patent dept.

Wojina writes "Microsoft has applied for a comprehensive
patent [1] on what appears to be the entire implementation
of the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) and the framework
APIs. Microsoft's CLR is an implementation of the CLI
(submitted to ECMA for standardization). Does this bode ill
for the Mono project [2]? See the CNET News story." [3] And
a chaser: Nept points to this interesting Microsoft-funded
.NET obfuscation project [4].

[1]
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='20030028685'.PGNR.&OS=DN/20030028685&RS=DN/20030028685
[2] http://www.go-mono.com/ ;(Also see:
http://www.dotgnu.org/)
[3] http://news.com.com/2100-1001-984052.html
[4]
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/research/areas/progtools/projects/dotnet.html

----

> http://news.com.com/2100-1001-984052.html

.Net patent could stifle standards effort 

By Lisa M. Bowman 
February 10, 2003, 3:00 PM PT

Microsoft is in the process of applying for a wide-ranging
patent that covers a variety of functions related to its
.Net initiative. 

If approved as is, the patent would cover application
programming interfaces (APIs) that allow actions related to
accessing the network, handling Extensible Markup Language
(XML), and managing data from multiple sources. APIs are the
hooks in software that allow applications to work with
another system. 

Microsoft declined to elaborate on its plans for the patent,
but intellectual property attorneys said that if it's
granted, the company could dictate how, or whether,
developers of software and devices can link to the .Net
initiative. 

"It looks pretty broad," said Jeff E. Schwartz, a partner
with McKenna Long & Aldridge. "It could be fairly
significant." 

The patent is one of several that Microsoft is applying for
related to .Net, the company's Web services initiative. By
submitting the application, which was filed last year and
made public last week, Microsoft is following the lead of
other major tech companies that have aggressively pursued
patents over the years. 

IBM is the most prolific patent generator, topping the list
of corporate patent awards for the last 10 years. Big Blue
landed 3,288 patents in 2002, bringing its total over the
past 10 years to more than 22,000. Lately, the company has
been focusing on patenting technology related to its
computing-on-demand initiative. 

Patents have become an increasingly common way for software
makers to exert control over their intellectual property.
One of the concerns about the proliferation of technology
patents is the impact it could have on standards
development. Some developers fear the trend will let a few
patent holders dictate the direction of standards. 

It's unclear what effect the Microsoft .Net patents would
have on the standards process. Microsoft already has
submitted many of the fundamentals of .Net to a standards
body known as ECMA, formerly called the European Computer
Manufacturers Association. 

One person affiliated with the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), another major standards body, said it's difficult to
comment on the .Net patents without knowing Microsoft's
specific plans. The W3C is in the process of developing a
policy that would let the organization include patented
technology in its standards as long as companies agree to
provide the technology royalty-free. The person, who asked
not to be identified, said Microsoft has agreed to such
terms in the past. 

IBM said last year that it would not charge royalties on
patented technology that is part of an e-commerce Web
standard. 

More and more, the patent debate is pitting companies like
IBM and Microsoft--which are looking to patents to protect
and recoup the millions of dollars they spend developing
products--against members of the open-source and free
software movements, which say the patent process stifles
innovation by covering processes that are common on the Web. 

People like Free Software Foundation guru Richard Stallman
have urged boycotts of companies that aggressively enforce
patents. 

Meanwhile, Bruce Perens, a consultant and leader of the
open-source movement, worries that Microsoft's patents could
shut out alternative software development. "Microsoft is
being careful to patent every aspect of APIs related to
.Net," he said. "It's preventing the open-source community
from being involved in this area." 

Open-source developers are already hard at work trying to
build open-source implementations of .Net. One of them, the
Mono Project, provides many of the same APIs as .Net. When
the Mono Project is completed next year, developers will be
able to build .Net applications that run on Linux and Unix.

----

> http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/research/areas/progtools/projects/dotnet.html

Programming Tools Group 

A transformation toolkit for the .NET intermediate language

Participants: Oege de Moor, Ganesh Sittampalam, Stephen
Drape 

Building on previous work in the group on imperative program
transformation, this project is funded by a gift from
Microsoft Corporation to develop a transformation toolkit
for the intermediate language of their new .NET intermediate
language, with particular application to obfuscation, that
is transformations which make decompiling difficult. 

We are building a system in which transformations can be
expressed in a declarative manner, which we hope will make
it easy to quickly implement new transformations. 

Obfuscation is of interest to many software vendors, who
wish to prevent people from stealing their ideas. As well as
transferring existing work on obfuscation to the .NET
platform, we hope to develop new methods that are provably
hard to undo. 

Apart from obfuscation, we would like to apply this system
to specialisation of library calls. The external interface
presented by libraries is often specialised to allow clients
to call it in an optimal manner. However, changes in the
internal implementation of the library might cause this
"optimal manner" to change, which creates a code maintenance
problem. Instead, we would like library interfaces to be
written in a generic way, but with any particular
implementation also exporting more functions that enable the
library to be used more optimally, together with
transformations that can be applied to client programs to
specialise uses of the generic interface to uses of these
functions where possible. 

For example, a sets library might export the methods elemOf
and insert, to check whether something was a member of a set
and to insert it into a set. To be safe, the implementation
of insert would have to first do the elemOf test (to avoid
adding a duplicate element to the set). However, the client
program might already have done this test, in which case it
could be omitted. The library could define insertNoTest,
together with a transformation that checked client programs
for uses of insert where no test was required (e.g. in the
scenario outlined above, or where the set had just been
initialised to empty), and changed them to insertNoTest. 

Useful links

Christian Collberg's Obfuscation and Watermarking resources
(http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~collberg/Research/Obfuscation/Resources.html)