On: Pseudo-Patent-Free Microsoft Standard

http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/effects/cifs/index.en.html

Microsoft bars GNU software from interoperating with CIFS

During the 1st week of April 2002, Microsoft published a
license for its new specification CIFS which it is trying to
establish as a de facto communication standard. This license
says that free software under GNU GPL, LGPL and similar
licenses may not use CIFS. It bases this ban on two broad
and trivial US patents with priority dates of 1989 and 1993.
We do not know yet to what extent the same methods have
received EPO patents.


http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-12.03.02-000/

Steve Ballmer 2002-03-12: Kein Tänzchen an der Leine 

Heise report about Steve Ballmer's talk at CeBit. At a
speech event together with chancellor Schroeder, Ballmer
says that Microsoft owns lots of patents which cover its new
DotNet standard and that it aims to use them to prevent
opensource implementations of DotNet. The key phrases read,
in translation:  Responding to questions about the
opening-up of the .NET framework, Ballmer announced that
there would certainly be a Common Language Runtime
Implementation for Unix, but then explained that this
development would be limited to a subset, which was intended
only for academic use. Ballmer rejected speculations about
support for free .NET implementationens such as Mono.


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Received on Monday, 8 April 2002 09:22:05 UTC