[OT] Microsoft filled patent applications for scoped and immutable types

[Era Scarecrow via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 04:25:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> He keeps harping on how MS is being evil, and GPL v3 prevents 
> the evil MS is attempting...but jesus crap he *WILL NOT* spend 
> ONE FUCKING WORD on ***HOW*** the shit any of that supposedly 
> works. We're supposed to just blindly accept all of it just 
> like the good little corporate whores he keeps trying to 
> crusade that we *shouldn't* be. Shit.

  If it's something like being on the news floor where they are 
talking to him, he doesn't have time. The loopholes he is talking 
about could take an hour of talk, not only in legal speak but in 
references and how things connect from law A to law B to law C, 
and how things actually work to the written letter of the law for 
an individual state (not to mention the whole country). They 
honestly aren't going to give him more than 5 minutes of screen 
time which means quite often for the large majority of people you 
have to greatly simplify it and keep it understandable for the 
general populous.

  The impression i got on the Novell pact: M$ would have acquired 
certain copyright ownership of all the programs that the OS 
contained. This would include programs such as: sort, awk, sed, 
grep, sh, tar, cpio, cp, mv, etc. Now since they have partial 
ownership, rights of all related programs that duplicate their 
effects fall under M$'s curfew (regardless who wrote them); They 
could start hampering on anyone trying to distribute OSes that 
involve any of these programs required to make the OS run, or sue 
them into the ground for infringing on copyright or patents; 
Thereby either you paid to keep the software somewhat free 
(probably each and every version/subversion) or they would gain 
total monopoly and Windows is the only OS you can get your hands 
on which you pay your usual $100-$200 for.

  I'm not sure how close i hit the bullseye, but i would imagine 
i'm not too far off. And if taken to court, they have the money 
and the influence to win regardless if they are right or wrong.