[OT] Free software versus software idea patents

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:37:45 -0500, harrismh777 wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>> The reason Mono gets hit (from others besides me) is that they are in
>>> >  partnership and collaboration with Microsoft, consciously and
>>> >  unconsciously. This must be punished.
>> Just like Python, Apache, and the Linux kernel. What are you going to
>> do to punish them?
> 
> What do you mean 'just like"....?    They are nothing alike.

All three of Python, Apache and Linux have accepted donations from 
Microsoft. Microsoft is a corporate sponsor of the PSF. Microsoft is not 
in the business of donating money and time to competitors out of the 
goodness of their heart. If Microsoft is giving them money or code, they 
must be getting something out of it.

All three projects actively collaborate with Microsoft from time to time, 
some more than others. .NET's IronPython is one of the "big four" Python 
implementations (the others being CPython, PyPy, and Jython), and 
actively supported by Microsoft. What's good for Python is good for 
IronPython and Microsoft.

Perhaps I should also have included Firefox and Thunderbird, which 
actively court Windows users and developers, sometimes at the expense of 
Linux users (e.g. the use of SQLite), thus legitimizing Windows as an OS 
for the FOSS community as well as improving the user-experience for 
Windows users.

Or Samba, which doesn't merely compete with Microsoft's SMB, but spreads 
it into the Unix world and legitimizes Microsoft's protocol among FOSS 
users. The Samba project has even worked side-by-side with Microsoft to 
solve technical issues with Vista connectivity (or at least the Samba-TNG 
project has).

You paint a very attractive picture of Good versus Evil, but real life is 
not as black and white as you make out. Mono fails to live up to your 
extremely high standards of FOSS purity, and so you dump on it. But so do 
some of the most important and widespread FOSS projects, yet you give 
them a free pass. Curious.


-- 
Steven