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Software Patents And Free Software
Opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. In response, various mechanisms have been tried to defuse the perceived problem. Positions from the community Community leaders such as Richard Stallman, Alan Cox (computer programmer), Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, and Linus Torvalds and companies such as Red Hat, and MySQL, and community groups such as Free Software Foundation Europe, FSFE, Irish Free Software Organisation, IFSO, all believe that patents cause problems for free software. Patent licensing Leading open-source figures and companies have complained that software patents are overly broad and the USPTO should reject most of them. Bill Gates has said "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today". Problems for free software Free software projects cannot agree to patent licences that include any kind of per-copy fe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Patents
A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm. Background A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state to a patent holder for a limited period of time, usually 20 years. These rights are granted to patent applicants in exchange for their disclosure of the inventions. Once a patent is granted in a given country, no person may make, use, sell or import/export the claimed invention in that country without the permission of the patent holder. Permission, where granted, is typically in the form of a license which conditions are set by the patent owner: it may be free or in return for a royalty payment or lump sum fee. Patents are territorial in nature. To obtain a patent, inventors must file patent applications in each and every country in which they want a patent. For example, separate applications must be filed in Japan, China, the United States and India if the applicant wishes to obtain pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Webbink
Mark Webbink is a lawyer and visiting professor of law at New York Law School (NYLS). At NYLS, Webbink serves as the executive director of the Center for Patent Innovations, the home of the Peer-to-Patent program. Webbink is also a senior lecturing fellow at Duke University School of Law and a member of the board of Software Freedom Law Center, which he joined in October 2007. Webbink worked at Red Hat as its first general counsel from 2000 to 2004 and its deputy general counsel for intellectual property from 2004 to August 2007, when he retired. Webbink wrote a blog, now defunct, covering open source and intellectual property issues. On May 16, 2011, Groklaw's Pamela Jones announced that Webbink would be Groklaw's new editor. References External links walkingwithelephants.comWebbink's blog (archived An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
League For Programming Freedom
League for Programming Freedom (LPF) was founded in 1989 by Richard Stallman to unite free software developers as well as developers of proprietary software to fight against software patents and the extension of the scope of copyright. Their logo is the Statue of Liberty holding a floppy disk and tape spool. Among other initiatives, the League started the "Burn all GIFs" campaign in opposition to the actions of Unisys in enforcing their patent on LZW compression used by CompuServe when creating the image format. The League produced a newsletter, ''Programming Freedom'', in 11 issues from 1991 to 1995. These primary source materials chronicle the work of the organization. The single event that had the most influence on the creation of the League was Apple's lawsuits against Microsoft about supposed copyrights violations of the look and feel of the Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mono (software)
Mono is a free and open-source .NET Framework-compatible software framework. Originally by Ximian, it was later acquired by Novell, and is now being led by Xamarin, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the .NET Foundation. Mono can be run on many software systems. History When Microsoft first announced their .NET Framework in June 2000 it was described as "a new platform based on Internet standards", and in December of that year the underlying Common Language Infrastructure was published as an open standard, "ECMA-335", opening up the potential for independent implementations. Miguel de Icaza of Ximian believed that .NET had the potential to increase programmer productivity and began investigating whether a Linux version was feasible. Recognizing that their small team could not expect to build and support a full product, they launched the Mono open-source project, on July 19, 2001 at the O'Reilly conference. After three years of development, Mono 1.0 was released on June 30, 20 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commerce One
Commerce One, Inc. was a B2B e-commerce company that used online auctions to connect business to their suppliers. At the peak of the dot-com bubble, the company had a market capitalization of $21.5 billion. The company's technologies included Schema for Object-Oriented XML (SOX), an XML schema technology that influenced the development of the W3C's XML Schema language and the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB). History The company was founded in 1994 as DistriVision by Tom Gonzales and his son, Tom Gonzales Jr. It was renamed Commerce One in 1997 after Mark Hoffman became CEO. In January 1999, the company acquired Veo Systems from Asim Abdullah for $300 million. In November 1999, the company acquired CommerceBid from Ramesh Balwani for $4.5 million in cash and 785,000 shares and the company partnered with General Motors to create an online marketplace. In July 1999, on its first trading day after its initial public offering, the company's stock price rose 190%. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linux Operating System
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy. Popular Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora Linux, and Ubuntu, the latter of which itself consists of many different distributions and modifications, including Lubuntu and Xubuntu. Commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland, and a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE Plasma. Distributions intended for se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open Invention Network
Open Invention Network (OIN) is a company that acquires patents and licenses them royalty-free to its community members who, in turn, agree not to assert their own patents against Linux and Linux-related systems and applications. History The company was incorporated on 31 October 2005. Based in Durham, NC, it was founded on November 10 by IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. NEC subsequently became a member. In December 2013, Google became a member. In July 2016, it was announced that Toyota became a member. On October 10, 2018, Erich Andersen announced that Microsoft joined as a licensee. Canonical and TomTom are associate members. Keith Bergelt is the chief executive of the company. Bergelt had previously served as President and CEO of Paradox Capital, LLC As of November, 2021 membership in the OIN stood at approximately 3,500 business licensees. The list of applications considered by OIN, according to Red Hat's Mark Webbink, includes Apache, Eclipse, Evolution, Fedora ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional electronic products, the largest video game console company and the largest video game publisher. Through Sony Entertainment Inc, it is one of the largest music companies (largest music publisher and second largest record label) and the third largest film studio, making it one of the most comprehensive media companies. It is the largest technology and media conglomerate in Japan. It is also recognized as the most cash-rich Japanese company, with net cash reserves of ¥2 trillion. Sony, with its 55 percent market share in the image sensor market, is the largest manufacturer of image sensors, the second largest camera manufacturer, and is among the semiconductor sales leaders. It is the world's largest player in the premium TV marke ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is still in Eindhoven. Philips was formerly one of the largest electronics companies in the world, but is currently focused on the area of health technology, having divested its other divisions. The company was founded in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik, with their first products being light bulbs. It currently employs around 80,000 people across 100 countries. The company gained its royal honorary title (hence the ''Koninklijke'') in 1998 and dropped the "Electronics" in its name in 2013, due to its refocusing from consumer electronics to healthcare technology. Philips is organized into three main divisions: Personal Health (formerly Philips Consumer Electronics and Philips Domestic Appliances and Personal Care), Connecte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novell
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the leadership of chief executive Ray Noorda, NetWare became the dominant form of personal computer networking during the second half of the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. At its high point, NetWare had a 63 percent share of the market for network operating systems and by the early 1990s there were over half a million NetWare-based networks installed worldwide encompassing more than 50 million users. Novell technology contributed to the emergence of local area networks, which displaced the dominant mainframe computing model and changed computing worldwide. Novell was the second-largest maker of software for personal computers, trailing only Microsoft Corporation, and became instrumental in making Utah Valley a focus for technology and softw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mozilla Public License
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers; it is distinguished from others as a middle ground between the permissive software BSD-style licenses and the General Public License. So under the terms of the MPL, it allows the integration of MPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases, but only on condition those components remain accessible. MPL has been used by others, such as Adobe to license their Flex product line, and The Document Foundation to license LibreOffice 4.0 (also on LGPL 3+). Version 1.1 was adapted by several projects to form derivative licenses like Sun Microsystems' Common Development and Distribution License. It has undergone two revisions: the minor update 1.1, and a major update version 2.0 nearing the g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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