[Clo] Rép. : Microsoft's Patent Promise

[Guy-Michel Lessard]

Ouin! ça vaut pas cher sauf pour tromper les développeurs.
 
Guy Lessard
Professeur CÉGEP de l'Outaouais
Québec, Canada

>>> Mathieu Brabant <Brabant at magma.ca> 2006-11-10 11:51:56 >>>

Je suis tombé sur cette lettre sur le site de Growlaw, elle intéressera 
sûrement ceux qui suivent le déroulement de l'entente...

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Letter to the FOSS Development Community Regarding Microsoft's Patent Promise
by Bradley M. Kuhn, Chief Technology Officer, Software Freedom Law Center

Last Thursday, Novell and Microsoft announced a new collaborative effort 
involving both licensing and technology. The Software Freedom Law Center has 
been following the situation, and as its CTO, I've held a particular interest 
in how it will impact Free Software developers. One result of the agreement, 
Microsoft's patent pledge to developers, has received significant interest 
from the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development community.

A careful examination of Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated 
Developers reveals that it has little value. The patent covenant only applies 
to software that you develop at home and keep for yourself; the promises 
don't extend to others when you distribute. You cannot pass the rights to 
your downstream recipients, even to the maintainers of larger projects on 
which your contribution is built.

Further, to qualify for the pledge, a developer must remain unpaid for her 
work. Experience has shown that many FOSS developers eventually expand their 
work into for-profit consulting. Others are hired by companies that allow or 
encourage Free Software development on company time. In either situation, 
Microsoft's patent pledge is voided for that developer.

Even if the patent pledge were to have some use aside from these problems, our 
community simply could not rely on it, since Microsoft has explicitly 
reserved the right to change its terms at any time in the future. A developer 
relying on the pledge could wake up any day to find it revoked. She'd have to 
cease development on her non-commercial and (mostly) non-distributable 
modifications that were previously subject to the covenant.

In short, the pledge applies precariously to developers who work in a vacuum: 
those who write original software in their spare time, receive no payment for 
it, and do not distribute it to anyone under the GNU GPL. It's worse than 
useless, as this empty promise can create a false sense of security. Don't be 
confused by the illusion of a truce; developers are no safer from Microsoft 
patents now than they were before. Instead, Microsoft has used this patent 
pledge to indicate that, in their view, the only good Free Software developer 
is an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer.

(http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061109111321376)
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