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Microsoft, slightly less evil? Makes huge patent contribution to OSS

Terryv

Link: https://www.fastcompany.com/90249831/microsoft-just-open-sourced-60000-of-its-patents

 

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The company has announced that it has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), a community that is dedicated to protecting open- source software from patent lawsuits by technology giants like Google, IBM, and, yep, even Microsoft.

I really like this. It's time they joined.

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With Microsoft’s contribution of 60,000 patents, the OIN has seen its patent library multiple almost 50 times over. Previously, OIN only had ownership of 1,300 global patents.

This is a huge potential boost to linux in the future. DX support? I hope so.

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wolf in sheep clothing or....

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Nothing more than MS pulling the old 3 E's again

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish

 

Proprietary MS Git commands when?

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This is a good PR move. We'll see how it plays out in the long run though. Microsoft has done enough abusive crap to the open-software and hardware communities very recently that this isn't going to make me lower my guard in the slightest.

 

Biggest question is what all patents were contributed? That's a lot of patents but if they're mostly trivial or if they impliment things dependent on other closed patents, it's naught more than a show for PR.

 

I really hope that this is them honestly commiting to open and collaboration focused development. 

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2 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Nothing more than MS pulling the old 3 E's again

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish

 

Proprietary MS Git commands when?

The problem with EEE is that if the first E makes them more money then they don't bother with the other two.  But that aside,  I am not sure how you can extinguish something you have no control over.   

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

The problem with EEE is that if the first E makes them more money then they don't bother with the other two.  But that aside,  I am not sure how you can extinguish something you have no control over.   

Big companies can generally do 3 things to incoming competition. 

 

1. Aquire and use their assets to further their own or run it into the ground and take over their staff.

 

2. Embrace. Dont fight, just abuse the marketshare you have and incorporate yourself into the competition making them a partner and not a competitor.

 

3. Extinguish. Use your marketshare to deny the other company any chance of expanding. 

 

If you do not do any of these you end up with a competitior that you will end up facing eventually.

 

Google is one of those who have dont these

 

1. I dont actually have an overview of the things Google have taken over

 

2. Embrace, seen with KaiOS in India

 

3. Windows on phone. Google cut the wire. And we saw how long it lasted. (Its not only google who made it flop, but it is one of the reasons)

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9 minutes ago, mr moose said:

The problem with EEE is that if the first E makes them more money then they don't bother with the other two.  But that aside,  I am not sure how you can extinguish something you have no control over.   

Innovate/Expand past the original patents with things people "want" or "need". Proprietary git commands specifically for the now Microsoft owned github for example.

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2 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Innovate/Expand past the original patents with things people "want" or "need". Proprietary git commands specifically for the now Microsoft owned github for example.

Yes, I have heard all that before, even had the big debate in the MS buys github thread, but the fact is OSS is different to a usual business where it might pay more to extinguish the service/product than to use it.   MS does not own OIN, if they have indeed given OIN these patents then MS can no longer control how they are used.  They can create services that start with them and then incorporate other patented code (the drug dealer type effect, get the consumer hooked so to speak), but that will not extinguish Linux or the OSS that exists as part of OIN. 

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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3 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Nothing more than MS pulling the old 3 E's again

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish

 

Proprietary MS Git commands when?

When was the last time they actually extinguished anything?

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1 hour ago, 2FA said:

When was the last time they actually extinguished anything?

It's been a while indeed.  But that doesn't mean they may not be trying it right now. 

Repeat offenders usually don't clean up their act, they just look for other ways to pull the same old tricks.

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59 minutes ago, Captain Chaos said:

It's been a while indeed.  But that doesn't mean they may not be trying it right now. 

Repeat offenders usually don't clean up their act, they just look for other ways to pull the same old tricks.

I'm just saying it's been nearly 20 years since the whole EEE situation, not exactly a short amount of time.

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This was posted on Hard OCP forum.

 

Why Microsoft may be relinquishing billions in Android patent royalties

 

Quote

 

As recently as 2013 a Nomura analyst estimated that Microsoft was extracting patent royalty streams of around $2 billion a year from makers of Android-running smartphones. 

 

...

 

OIN community members agree to give each other free licenses to use one another’s patent portfolios with respect to any inventions that might implicate Linux, Android, and other key open-source software packages. At the same time, OIN’s eight funding members amass and maintain a defensive patent portfolio to protect the whole community from outside aggressors. They attempt to create, as its CEO Keith Bergelt has put it, a patent “no-fly zone” over Linux.

 

The dreaded aggressor that, more than any other, prompted this whole elaborate, anti-ballistic missile system was Microsoft. Today, the lion lays down with the lamb—or with the Linux Penguin, in this case.

 

...

 

Why is Microsoft doing this? In part, Android royalty revenues have been steadily declining over the past three years, according to its securities filings. That may be because some Indian and Chinese smartphone manufacturers, which don’t pay royalties, have been gaining market share.

 

More important, however, the company’s burgeoning Azure cloud services business has become its strategic priority for the future. Azure revenues were up 89 percent year-over-year for the latest quarter, and the company reported $23 billion in income from its “commercial cloud” category for fiscal 2018.

 

"By coming to the table at OIN," says Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and the executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center, "Microsoft has acknowledged that the royalties it can acquire by squeezing Android manufacturers are no longer worth the maintenance of patent tension which interferes with the growth of the services business."

 

To build its Azure business, Moglen explains, Microsoft first enticed existing customers to transfer work from their on-premises Windows servers to Microsoft’s cloud services. But to keep growing that business, it also had to lure customers who were using Linux on-premises into transferring their workloads to Azure, too. Since those customers wanted to continue running Linux—so they could integrate all their data, on-premises and off—Microsoft accommodated them. As a result, “about half” of all Azure workloads today are running on Linux, Microsoft’s cloud group chief told ZDNet last month.

 

 

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27 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

As recently as 2013 a Nomura analyst estimated that Microsoft was extracting patent royalty streams of around $2 billion a year from makers of Android-running smartphones. 

what patents did MS have over android phones?

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51 minutes ago, Arika S said:

what patents did MS have over android phones?

 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-android-licensing-agreements-revealed-by-chinese-gov/

 

From the article :

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A list detailing all 310 patents can be found here (.DOCX).

I downloaded it, ran MSE to check for nasties and found nothing bad, but by all means scan it yourself to make sure. 

It's pretty boring and mostly nondescript stuff.  You'll have to search for each patent number to get the details.

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What would really work is "Lindows 10". A free version of Windows 10 (Windows 10L for "Linux" or Windows 10 Penguin) entirely based on Linux that also has Microsoft Store (meaning it could run all the Microsoft Store apps except maybe games which depend on Windows stuff) and the usual repository found in all Linux distros. On the outside, it would look, feel and behave the same as Windows 10, but underneath it would be pure Linux. I think that would work in a positive way for users as well as Microsoft.

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They just want to spread their software and services if they can’t get users to switch to Windows 10. 

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13 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

wolf in sheep clothing or....

I like how they've signed up to make programs that are open source better protected...

Yet they charge you £12 for the ability to watch DVDs with Windows 10 

 

I once did the unthinkable, back many headphones ago...

I split an audio split, again

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13 hours ago, Terryv said:

This is a huge potential boost to linux in the future. DX support? I hope so.

Don't count on it. It is just a cross-license agreement, not committing to implement anything.

It just means that these patents can no longer be used to sue potential infringements in GNU/Linux.

 

 

13 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Nothing more than MS pulling the old 3 E's again 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish

 

Proprietary MS Git commands when?

EEE is a worry, not in this case.

Adding their patents to the defensive patent pool for GNU/Linux doesn't really position them any better or worse to execute EEE.

 

 

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

The problem with EEE is that if the first E makes them more money then they don't bother with the other two.  But that aside,  I am not sure how you can extinguish something you have no control over.   

1) This move will directly result in Microsoft not making as much money as they used to. Up until now, Microsoft has relentlessly been suing and threatening Android handset manufacturers with patent lawsuits, and as a result they have made a lot of money from it.

In 2013, Microsoft made 1 billion dollars in royalty payments from Samsung alone. In 2015 it was estimated that Microsoft made 6 billion dollars from patent fees from Android handsets.

This will no longer be possible.

If you think joining OIN is a good business move then you're gonna have to explain how you expect this move to offset the billions upon billions of dollars it will cost Microsoft.

 

 

2) Microsoft has massive control over large parts of the open source community now. I know you believe that since it's open source, it can't be harmed, but that is not the case. I have already given you several examples of Microsoft ruining ope source and open standards in the past but for some reason you refuse to acknowledge it (possibly from a lack of understanding how important de-facto standards are and how it works when integrating them into things).

 

 

7 hours ago, 2FA said:

I'm just saying it's been nearly 20 years since the whole EEE situation, not exactly a short amount of time.

That's because Microsoft have had a very strict anti-trust regulation lawsuit over them, and the original ruling expired in 2012. For example Microsoft was not allowed to create a PDF reader because potential abuse. Microsoft have only really been free to abuse their position again since 2013 with the release of Windows 8.

That haven't stopped them from other shady and despicable actions tough which aren't strictly EEE. For example hijacking the development and standardization of an open document format.

Wanna know why Word documents always renders incorrectly when opened in for example LibreOffice? Here is an explanation:

Spoiler

On 4/9/2016 at 7:44 PM, LAwLz said:

 

 

I can blame Microsoft for it, and I will blame Microsoft for it. Have you ever looked at how ISO 29500 came about? It was pretty clear Microsoft did it to try and kill competing solutions. I talked about it in this post. Here it is again if you're interested:

Spoiler

ISO, the international organization for standardization, tried to solve the problem of document formats back in 2006 by creating the ODF. ODF, or Open Document Format is what is most commonly used by open office suits such as Libre and Open Office by default. Since this was seen as a threat to Microsoft, they decided to make their own "open" format in 2007. This format, called OpenXML or ECMA-376 was originally rejected by ISO because there was no point in making it when they already had ODF. However, somehow Microsoft managed to get their format fast-tracked in ISO even though 20 out of 30 countries on the JTC-1 committee criticized the format.

So because of that and some other reasons, the OpenXML format was split up into two ISO standards. One was called ISO 29500 Transitional, and the other one was ISO 29500 Strict. The strict version was the one officially accepted by ISO, and the transitional version was granted to Microsoft in order to allow them to smoothly transition users from the old, closed formats, to the new open one. Sounds good in theory.

 

However, Microsoft then decided to not fully implement the strict version of the ISO standard in Office 2010. Office 2010 (and later from what I know) can only write to the transitional format, but it can read both ECMA-376 and ISO 29500 Strict.

 

What this means is that when you open an OpenXML format in Office, it will be able to read it just fine. However, when you write an OpenXML document in Office it will write it in the transitional format which is not the format approved by ISO for continued usage. So since Microsoft's programs write in a format only approved to them during a transitional phase, the other office suits which supports OpenXML will try to read them as ISO 29500 Strict, which is the actual standard which should be used, and that causes some problems.

 

I haven't checked what Office uses today, but back in 2010 Microsoft wrote that they would move to ISO 29500 Strict no later than Office 15. Once they do that the compatibility issues should disappear.

Also, reading through the XML file to see how OOXML works in Office is not possible either, because the documentation is pretty shit (last time I read about it). For example the printer settings are/were stored in a binary blog and could therefore only work on Windows. No documentation on how to interpret the printOptions if you wanted to implement it yourself (like in LibreOffice) exist(ed). 

The specifications does not say how clipboard data works either. The documentation just said "it must be -3, -2, -1, 0 or any positive integer", and then did not explain anything about what the differences were between the numbers. The formats were also binary blobs. No documentation on it. 

OOXML also uses very few other standards, while ODF does. That's why the specification is something like 6000 pages long (compared to about 700 pages). Like I explained above, some of the things OOXML relies on are binary blobs. It's things like that which prevents OOXML from being a true open standard, and proper support for it in other programs. Not just that, but there are issues with Microsoft changing the standard as well. 

  

 

It does not take a genius to understand that if a Microsoft format does not work properly on ANY competing products, despite their attempts to make it work, then the problem lies with Microsoft. Especially since other formats works just fine. 

Here is a pretty good read about ODF vs OOXML: If I was Sauron

 

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1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

 

1) This move will directly result in Microsoft not making as much money as they used to. Up until now, Microsoft has relentlessly been suing and threatening Android handset manufacturers with patent lawsuits, and as a result they have made a lot of money from it.

In 2013, Microsoft made 1 billion dollars in royalty payments from Samsung alone. In 2015 it was estimated that Microsoft made 6 billion dollars from patent fees from Android handsets.

This will no longer be possible.

If you think joining OIN is a good business move then you're gonna have to explain how you expect this move to offset the billions upon billions of dollars it will cost Microsoft.

You'd have to consult their accountants for that info, but my first guess would be from there heavy push into services and cloud/data centre business and the fact that revenue from phone patents is dying they see dollar signs elsewhere.

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

 

2) Microsoft has massive control over large parts of the open source community now. I know you believe that since it's open source, it can't be harmed, but that is not the case. I have already given you several examples of Microsoft ruining ope source and open standards in the past but for some reason you refuse to acknowledge it (possibly from a lack of understanding how important de-facto standards are and how it works when integrating them into things).

 

 

I'm not going to have the github debate again, but lets just say open office and the other variants of office seem to be doing very well with their uncontested access to MS document format.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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3 hours ago, EnergyEclipse said:

I like how they've signed up to make programs that are open source better protected...

Yet they charge you £12 for the ability to watch DVDs with Windows 10 

 

Doesnt the windows disk player also include a liscence to read bluray disks? 

 

Like in that context it makes sence. I believe it is illegal to own the decryption keys without having a liscence with Sony. I could be misstaken though, my info is quite outdated. About 2014-ish

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9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

That's because Microsoft have had a very strict anti-trust regulation lawsuit over them, and the original ruling expired in 2012. For example Microsoft was not allowed to create a PDF reader because potential abuse. Microsoft have only really been free to abuse their position again since 2013 with the release of Windows 8.

That haven't stopped them from other shady and despicable actions tough which aren't strictly EEE. For example hijacking the development and standardization of an open document format.

Wanna know why Word documents always renders incorrectly when opened in for example LibreOffice? Here is an explanation:

  Reveal hidden contents

It's a hard oof from me, mainly because Office 2013 and later has support for writing to Strict Open XML. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/08/13/new-file-format-options-in-the-new-office/

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7 hours ago, GoldenLag said:

Doesnt the windows disk player also include a liscence to read bluray disks? 

 

Like in that context it makes sence. I believe it is illegal to own the decryption keys without having a liscence with Sony. I could be misstaken though, my info is quite outdated. About 2014-ish

Both DVD and Blu-Ray have licenses associated with them.

 

Microsoft used to eat the cost, but their telemetry showed a vast decline in people using their 1st party software for this task, so why eat the cost?

 

Some of the free software out there no doubt just ignores the license fee and doesn't pay it - something Microsoft would likely get sued over if they tried the same.

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