MS patents make a no-op of their latest interop announcement
A lot of media reports seem to have missed that Microsoft have said very explicitly that they consider patent licences mandatory for anyone who wants to use the interop info they’re going to publish. This makes it pretty much unusable by free software, so this PR stunt is no more than that.
Below is a snippet from Microsoft’s recent press conference transcript. The announcement is so slippery, even Ballmer forgot what weasel words to use and needed interuption from Brad Smith 🙂
STEVE BALLMER: Patents will be, not freely, will be available.
BRAD SMITH: Readily available.
STEVE BALLMER: Readily available for the right fee. The basic economic analysis that you should go through sort of goes like this. We have valuable intellectual property in our patents, we will continue to view that as valuable intellectual property in all forms, and we will monetize from all users of that, not all developers, but for all users of that patented technology, all commercial developers, and all commercial users of that patented technology.
Groklaw has an article on the announcement: Promises, Promises from Microsoft. Again.
Update: FSFE has now issued a PR about this: Microsoft pledge excluding primary competitors.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
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