News Microsoft hit with $200m patent fine

Yeah, now you say that the patent system is wrong, until you create something great and someone else just takes it and makes huge money with it. I bet this would change your view 180 degrees.

Microsoft infringed many patents, in most situations they just shut up other (usually small) companies with money and the case never makes it to the public, the only moments you hear about it is when someone is not smart enough to use the "we'll go public unless you pay us" and thinks that taking the case to the court will earn them more. I think that Microsoft (but this applies to most really big companies) thinks of this as a way of buying the code or solutions. It would probably cost them more to develop it on their own, so they just take the ready solutions and shut everyone up with cash. $200m is pocket money for them and they have some really good lawyers.

 

There's no difference, except that referring to the entire OS as Linux ignores the work of thousands of (unpaid) people who worked on the software for the GNU project which is included in any "Linux" distribution. Ubuntu's apparently the favoured one nowadays: Gnome is GNU's desktop manager, to give a very visible example. Plus, if it weren't for the GNU Project, the Linux kernel would probably have been a lot less famous, and a lot less used. When Torvalds GPLed his kernel, eight years of software development was ready to be built around it. If people want to use Linux only, I wish them a lot fun with their kernel and software development

It is wrong because, as Faulk_Wulf said:

Right now, you can patent very general ideas that have many implementations. This stifles development by other people who cannot or don't want to pay you for your general idea.

Then there's the problem of big companies (IBM, for one), who can afford all the fees, patenting just about anything they can lay their hands on; holding on to those patents until another company develops something that is slightly close to "their" general idea and pounce on them with a lawsuit.

If I were able to patent my modding ideas, more than twenty people from this site alone would've been in court. It's a ridiculous idea. An idea is an idea and you shouldn't be able to patent it.
A very specific function? Yes. A very general function with thousands of applications, of which you're only going to use one? No. An idea? No.

 

...*YAWN*... Yet another company trying to take a chunk out of a competitor with a pointless "patent" suit... Never been here before...

 

I have already come up with a couple of ideas that i thought about, but never patented. a few years after my ideas, low and behold someone else is building them.

Using tft screens for picture frames and memory cards was an idea i had several years ago

 

i never thought before that Microsoft would do this.

 

how do you patent XML tags? I'm lost on this. XML is free code that shouldn't be patent controlled. I agree with Microsoft on this one, it makes no apparent sense as this patent should be invalidated to begin with.