Funny patent request

[Nonno Bassotto]

Maybe it has already been posted.Anyway here (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220030189597%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20030189597&RS=DN/20030189597) is a request from Microsoft for a patent about virtual desktops.

It doesn't sound very original, does it? Indeed you if browse through the images you can find a mockup of how it will look... showing a familiar foot...

[FuturePilot]

I need image/tiff plugin. What is that?

[esaym]

Sounds like they just patent everything that they do

[Nonno Bassotto]

I need image/tiff plugin. What is that?

I attached a screenshot. There's a Gnome foot in their mockup

[Pekkalainen]

Sounds like they just patent everything that they do

...or whatever anybody else does for that matter :mad:

[Darkagentx]

I attached a screenshot. There's a Gnome foot in their mockup

...and this is from microsoft? That doesn't make any sense why that'd be there.

[Sunforge]

This was filed back in 2003, so it should have cropped up somewhere. If you look at their diagrams they've put KDE and GNOME desktops into their supporting documentation.

It did get mentioned on Slashdot some time ago:

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/02/25/1346201.shtml

It was certainly a cheeky request though.

[bonzodog]

The thing with this whole patent FUD is that the MS lawyers are well aware that they could not actively actually carry out any of their threats without assuring Microsofts destruction of it's key product :Windows.

It's a cold war of kinds that MS have chosen to start. It's mutually assured destruction. They could bring a lot of Linux development to a halt, though not any in the EU. Likewise, the Linux community already has legal support from The Nazgul (aka IBM Legal), could start bringing the patent war to MS's own front door, and destroy software development in the US for good.

One of the key reasons that MS struck the agreement with Novell is because Novell own 95% of the Unix codebase, and MS have actually broken quite a few patents with-in that codebase.

The other big advantage of Linux development is in the very nature of open source itself. It's highly distributed, and a huge amount of the Linux program codebase is based outside the US. Even Linus holds kernel code in Finland still, so if any of this kicked off, he merely shifts kernel development back to Finland. It just means that no-one can use or distribute any of the code legally in the US without paying each other huge amounts of money. But, again, it would be like trying to catch the wind; utterly futile. If you think trying to pin down torrents servers and P2P services is hard, Open source is *much* harder. Most of the software is hosted on mirrored servers around the world, and cannot be take down legally.

[FuturePilot]

Now who's steeling from who:p