The Official FF Open Source Fight Thrad

[seebs]

Early on there were reports that they were going to prohibit disabling secure boot, but they backed down on it.

[Chatter]

For those of you who want a readable version of Doctorow's talk, he's written up an article..

[lisarea]

I'm just putting this here because I am trying to kill FF by not starting enough threads.

Jailbreaking Is Not A Crime: Tell the Copyright Office to Free Your Devices! | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Even if you've never done it and never expect to, making it a crime to tinker with equipment you own outright is something everyone should care about.

[Megatron]

Originally Posted by Kyuss Apollo

The new Windows Office, 2007? 2010? what is this I don’t even

I FUCKING HATE OFFICE 2007. FUCKING HATE OFFICE 2010 THREE MORE THAN OFFICE 2007.

OpenOffice works with Windows 7 and is better in every way and is fucking free.

You know what you must do.

[lisarea]

I hereby decree that it is OK to talk about patent trolling in this thrad:

Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Troll's Claim to Own the Interactive Web | Threat Level | Wired.com

It does have all the elements to make a sweet little morality tale. The good guys who created something for everyone's benefit, and shared it with the people, who loved it and created their own innovative works building upon it; then the bad guys who tried to destroy it for their own personal gain.

The only thing missing is the part where the judge orders Eolas, jointly and severally, to have metal shoes sewn to their feet and to dance in a pit of fire until they are dead.

[Kael]

The Eolas patents were denounced for years before this week’s landmark trial, but managed to survive repeated re-exams at the United States Patent and Trade Office.

I'd like to know just how the fuck that happened... Someone should probably be fired for it.

[lisarea]

That's a particularly egregious example, but really, there shouldn't be software patents at all. They're all ridiculous and terrible to varying degrees.

[Kael]

Yeah, I don't really get how they would work anyway, does someone patent their peculiar arrangement of code? How much coding has to be similar for it to be a patent violation? Is it a patent violation if another piece of software does exactly the same thing but uses a different method, so very little of the coding is the same? I just don't see how that would actually work in a real-world environment.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by Megatron

OpenOffice works with Windows 7 and is better in every way and is fucking free.

You know what you must do.

lisarea taught me about OpenOffice and I started using on accounta free. It is awesome. I had an old licensed copy of Office when I got this new-to-me but otherwise middle aged computer sent to me from the bosses, but Word stopped working and I don't have the disc so OpenOffice rescued me

I note that Google Docs has p. decent free stuff including a PowerPoint type thing and spreadsheets. I use it quite a lot too.

[Qingdai]

I just found out my computer (which I use to write to letters to insurance companies, mainly) that I bought didn't import my word processing software. Stupid Mac, an it looks like Open Office works with Mac. Thanks!

[lisarea]

Software patenting seems almost inconceivable really because it should be, but software patents can pertain to almost any aspect of software you can imagine. Imagine the stupidest possible thing you could patent, and rest assured that it's worse than that.

Design elements, basic development techniques, or features. It covers a much broader range of things than copyright, so to violate a software patent, you wouldn't even have to show that something had any code in common at all.

This looks like an OK introduction to the topic, with links to more information.

Apple isn't technically a patent troll, because patent lawsuits aren't their sole business, but they've certainly been borrowing from the patent trolls' playbooks in recent years, including:

'Steve Jobs swore to destroy Android' | Technology | The Guardian

In that one, they claimed patent on, among other things, turning phone numbers and email addresses into clickable links. Not the code to do it, because that would be copyrightable. The basic function of automatically making contact information clickable.

Apple to Samsung: Don't Make Thin or Rectangular Tablets or Smartphones | PCWorld

Oh, also rectangles and rounded corners, and the colors clear and black. Plus having a display in the middle of a device, and also a clean design aesthetic. Because Apple invented centering and rectangles and the idea of making stuff that does not have like gargoyles and plastic flowers and stuff all glued to the front of it. (That's actually hardware, but they sued claiming patent for the same types of things on software as well.)

[LadyShea]

About 12 years ago the company I work for got a letter that they were violating some other guy's patent on faxes to email. Like the one above it wasn't about code or anything, just the act of intercepting a faxed image and sending it to an email address. It's a digital image...how can you patent attaching an image to an email?

[lisarea]

Either I vaguely remember reading something about a fax-to-email-and-vice-versa patent troll, or I vaguely remember you talking about it.

But also, this helps explain exactly how software patents became so ridiculous and shitty:

One Reason Why The USPTO Granted Ridiculously Stupid Internet Patents: Patent Examiners Were Banned From Using The Internet | Techdirt

The thing about software development is that even very common techniques and functions are usually not very well documented in academic literature or anything like that. And because software patenting is a fairly recent thing (it's always been muddy, but until precedent for doing it had been established, it was sort of 'common knowledge' that it wasn't patentable), there's little and often no documentation of prior art in the form of established patents. So once the floodgates opened, there was apparently a big scramble to patent all kinds of shit that everyone had already been doing, and the examiners at the patent office were literally NOT ALLOWED to discover previous work. Which is just mind-bogglingly terrible and stupid.

[LadyShea]

You may have read about it, because IIRC multiple companies were targeted back then...though the technology is ubiquitous now it was kinda new then, which seems a good time for one or another of the early innovators to say "I own all the idea". It's like they don't believe it's possible for independent parallel development to occur or something.

[seebs]

A lot of those aren't software patents but "business method" patents.

The underlying idea of the patent system is that it's expensive to invent something and cheap to imitate it, so inventors need some kind of protection against other people lifting their work -- and an incentive to publish.

The thing is, 17 years or whatever was a short time when it came into being, but now 17 years is two or three major technological shifts. Honestly, if patents were for a year or so, I don't think any fucks would be given WHAT you could patent, because people could just wait it out.

But at that point, why bother having the system?

MHO, it's not really buying us anything. Turns out there is adequate incentive to invent with or without patents.

[ceptimus]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Software patenting seems almost inconceivable really because it should be, but software patents can pertain to almost any aspect of software you can imagine. Imagine the stupidest possible thing you could patent, and rest assured that it's worse than that.

BBC News - Patents: Apple wins over Motorola in 'slide-to-unlock' ruling

Because no one ever had that idea before.

[Kyuss Apollo]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Imagine the stupidest possible thing you could patent

I am going to patent assholes.

[erimir]

Apple would owe you a lot of royalties.

[Goliath]

I would like to patent a respiratory process by which oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide.

[Ymir's blood]

I am going to patent leather shoes.

[seebs]

I have a joke web page about our exclusive voice-over-nitrogen technology.

[Watser?]

I'm gonna go patent the milking of cows before anyone else thinks of it!

[lisarea]

Holy crap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFZGpES-St8

Bye, everybody! I have a new BFF.

That is even almost exactly the desktop I put on the new computer I set up for my mom.

[lisarea]

Oh lol. This is the thrad where we all complained about word processors. Not totally relevant to the stated thrad topic, but it took me a while to find this, so it's going here:

Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It’s time for it to die. - Slate Magazine

[Ymir's blood]

I've begun to think that 'feature' is a synonym for 'rage inducing nausea fuel.'