Microsoft to seek royalties from open-source software distributors & users

#39

Oh I’m definately not holding up Gimp as an example of stunning open source innovation. :slight_smile: Much of Gimp is indeed a copy of Photoshop. Some of it is not. The Gimp team is innovating in some of its rewriting for the next version (GEGL infrastructure), and the scripting system seems more flexible than Photoshop actions. But until the Gimp core is rewritten a bit more, there probably won’t be any easily visible innovation.

Gimp hasn’t been developed as much as Photoshop in some areas I feel are very important. Gimp is certaintly useable (I use it instead of PS since I’m on Linux), but Photoshop is certainly ahead of it in useablilty and workflow. It’s not the method of development that makes Gimp trail Photoshop in functionality (open vs closed source), it is simply the amount of development that has been put into it (Photoshop has been around longer and has more man-hours of development put into it).

I’m on Linux. Photoshop is not available on Linux. So the entire “can or cannot compete” argument is largely moot because Photoshop isn’t even an option for me. Gimp, Krita, and Pixel are competition under Linux. Again, I would love for Adobe to bring Photoshop to Linux because I’d buy a copy.

This is a good policy, and I hope none of my responses have been interpreted as personal offenses. It is best to debate the ideas, not attack the people who expressed them.

Cheers,
Michael Duffy

#40

Thanks for the links. As a newbie to open source software I learned a lot from this thread.

A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee. You don’t do that if you can still reach the ball, even if you genuinely believe you’ve been fouled. - paulgraham.com

#41

This is just another FUD attack from Microsoft, among many, many others throughout the last +5 years, against FOSS/Linux. It is scared, and rightly so. Some part of me hope that MS will take action, because then it will be apparent to all, what threat that corporation really is to the free market and innovation. Then again, I have no faith in the US legal system when it comes to these matters, and I’m sure MS has “friends” high in the hierachy…

Speaking of innovation: it is as if MS has changed the definition of the word, and then patented it, because they sure use that word alot… It’s a known fact that Microsoft and originality are words seldom used together. I still remember seeing their first presentation of Longhorn’s new, “innovative” 3D interface a couple of years ago, and laughed out loud when I saw the flipping of windows, because I saw that exact feature 2 years earlier in Project Looking Glass! Sure, they can come up with something new, but it is the largest software company in the world, and their rate of development is sad compared to (Free) OSS! I have no sympathy nor respect for Microsoft.

Comparing large companies to open source projects is unfair. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, IIRC, only has a handfull of developers working for free in their spare time on it. How many does Adobe employ? Sure, Open Office has people from SUN working on it, but compare that to the whole Office Division at Microsoft (probably larger than Adobe…) Don’t take Free Software for granted!

About the open formats (PNG, Ogg Vorbis/Theora, SVG, ODF, etc.), it’s up to us, as in you and me, to make them viable alternatives. Every change starts with yourself (not trying to sound cheesy). No reason to rip your CD/DVD collection to MP3/WMV. It also helps that more and more governments decides to use open formats.

toontje-> It is not only Linux (the kernel) MS is accusing, but also Desktop Enviroments and general open source projects. It’s time Microsoft put up or shut up.

#42

The short story is that it does try. Gimp had multiple undo before Photoshop (wow that was a long time ago), I am not sure but I think the scissors tool was there before the magnetic lasso in photoshop… To my mind anyways Photoshop has better tools but Gimp has better base workflow… (customisable keyboard bindings - no modal dialogs except where absolutely necessary) if you are trained on Photoshop first you learn a workflow that works for Photoshop so for most people this a moot point. the fact that there are a couple of really bad ui decisions thrown in there doesn’t help either.
The best way to think of the gimp was that it was loosely based on Photoshop 3 and then evolved down it’s own path. After the original Authors left the project the strongest forces are the ones keeping it the way it is. Recently it has received a usuability study and the next gen stuff that was supposed to happen 5 years ago is actually moving again now.

Its funny you should say that because the oldest 3D accelerated GUI toolkit that I know about is open source. check out evas on this page http://www.enlightenment.org/Enlightenment/DR17/
It may not to stack up to Apple and Microsofts offerings. But 5 years ago it was damned innovative. (its a pity it is not more widely used).

Also you are right Beryl is about desktop effects one component of a 3D desktop. X has fairly strict modularity and Beryl runs in line with that.
In order to get seemless integration you need the GUI toolkit makers to support 3D acceleration (this is being worked on) and then for everybody to sit down and figure out the new ways in which the window manager (beryl) and the toolkits (GTK, QT etc) to communicate with each other.
Its a different process than when one company owns the show and usually takes longer - but that is the nature of the beast.

p.s.s.: It’s surprise how some people blame MS for the lack of innovation and in the same time has no idea that some of the modern “cool” technologies were introduced by MS (like Gadgets with RSS support, that were already in Win98 known as “Active Desktop Items”, or desktop searching that is already present on every XP machine and allow user to search through some kind of documents). Sure, what we have today is much much better, but it’s called evolution/progress.

Well XPs document search miles away from an indexing searcher and I am betting that it was far from the first software of its kind. In fact as far as I can see it is little more than a glorified UI version of what Grep does. Active Desktop however was an interesting idea.

Anyways rather than get further into a pissing war I think we can conclude that both Microsoft and OpenSource innovate. And that Software is mostly a process of building on existing ideas.

#43

From wikipedia:

The basic idea of re-structuring metadata information about web sites has been traced back at least as far as 1995, and the work of Ramanathan V. Guha and others at Apple Computer’s (now, Apple Inc.) Advanced Technology Group developing the Meta Content Framework (MCF).[2] Other early work on XML syndication formats, including RDF, took place at Netscape, Userland Software, and Microsoft.

RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Ramanathan V. Guha of Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My Netscape portal. This version became known as RSS…

Als

#44

I vaguely remember some sort of push technology working with that desktop thing in windows 98… Now long and buried… It wasn’t rss though.

#45

Simple question: Why is your wife not using OpenOffice or LaTex? But uses Word instead?
This is the key question all your open source advocates have to ask yourself?

Open source software on the other hand has little interest in being incompatible with other software packages, because that hinders application adoption and goes against the

They have a good reason for being so if it threatens their existance as in this case it is. I mean I can understand why a Software company who invented a file format wants to have exclusive rights on it! And there is no argument around it. It’s theirs and they are the owner and they can do whatever they want with it!

#46

Respectfully I disagree… What Goes into that file as a customer is my work not the company who created the software. If I want to use other tools to interoperate with MY data I bloody well will, What I do with my data once it has left their program is quite frankly none of their business… Those ones and zeros that the program wrote belong to me Intellectual property law expressly permits reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability. I will do so and I will quite happily see in court any party who says otherwise.

Companies should compete on Price, Features, Value and Service they offer the consumer not on locking any potential competition artificially via IP Restrictions.

#47

I disagree. A company providing a file format to work with their products is their IP. They give rights for others to use said format with their software. Years ago Macromedia tried to force users to pay royalties for Director created exectuables or at a mimimum, place their logo at the end of the Director presentation. It was their right… they created the software and the portable run time format to play presentations you would create. If you still disagree… a format today which is more popular than Paris Hilton is MP3. To this day, lots of companys still owe Franhoffer(?) cash for using his MP3 compression without permission. I know some of the larger companies who have adopted the MP3 file format into their software had to pay licensing fees to do so, including the zealots at Apple. If you too come up with a file format, you too can bloody well charge people to use it.

#48

thats entirely different. the “mp3-patents” are about the algorithms used to (de)compress audio. it has nothing todo with the fileformat.

furthermore you can only legaly patent stuff you did first. this rules out patents about most fileformats.

and finally, you mix patents and coperight. there is no ip about fileformats. because fileformats don’t do anything, there is nothing to be protected. you can only protect methodes needed to transform data so they make sense in the fileformat - though only if nobody ever used (or patented ;)) this method before.

#49

Firstly, it is not the file format that can be patented, but the compression and decompression system and methods. Secondly, by disagreeing with KayosIII, are you saying that as a business practice locking customers into your product via a closed file format is a viable alternative to actually producing a superior product that customers will want to purchase?

Take a look at Adobe Photoshop. It is a superior product to the free alternatives, which is why people will pay such a high price for it. Allowing other products to use its .psd format doesn’t seem to hurt its market share at all, in fact it makes Photoshop that much more useful to Adobe customers. I have to agree with KayosIII that it is smarter to compete by developing a superior product to the competition.

#50

My wife doesn’t use OpenOffice probably out of familiarity. The icon to launch Word is in her Start Menu and I haven’t put the icon for OOWriter there yet. She probably wouldn’t miss Word if she used OpenOffice, but since Word works for her she probably doesn’t see a point in using something else.

She probably will switch to Firefox soon, if she hasn’t already, since Internet Explorer crashes often and annoys the hell out of her. (edit: ah, just found out that she does use Firefox now.)

My wife could probably get along with a Linux desktop just fine. I don’t know if GNUCash allows downloading of our bank statements as easily as our copy of Quicken 2003 does, and she uses iTunes which isn’t available under Linux so she’d miss that. But last night she told me the main reason I’m not allowed to put Linux on her notebook: If I install Linux then I’ll always be on her machine, so by keeping it as a Windows box she knows that I’ll leave her computer the hell alone! :smiley:

Cheers,
Michael Duffy

#51

Well the reason is because they used it at work, and that’s what they are familiar with.
Therefore if they consider what they gonna buy and use at home, this will mainly be something they know how to use (I’m talking about basic users, not advanced).
But if the product is so much better, or it can’t run on their home computer, they might consider buying the alternative. Or even better use something for free!
Firefox is so much better because community supports it. For this exact reason windows is still going strong because there is so many people using it and developing for it. It has also strong law of physics behind it - inertia.
Microsoft is constantly trying to pry their eye into my privacy and control everything we do, which is really anoying.
I’ve installed microsoft shell in order to make some scripts, like I used to do on Irix, and once I wrote my first one, it asked me to send it to microsoft so it allowed me to run it?
What the hell is that about?

Als

#52

:wise:Typically microsoft greedy bastards

#53

Well I give you an advice you’ll better read their EULA before using the software since in court you might have a hard time if you clicked on the accept button before!

#54

Actually I do read the EULAs of most of the software I own. ( I don’t own that much software that doesn’t use a standard licensing agreement). I have yet to come across any that states “Any works created in this program are property of us and we will decide how and where you may use the data you create”. That sort of thing just wouldn’t wash.

#55

It would be patent infringement if OpenOffice used microsoft code for handling those document formats but it is legal to for non-microsoft sanctioned developers to reverse engineer and even patent another compatible method of handling those proprietary document formats., both reading and writing. (See further down on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDocument_and_Office_Open_XML_formats under “Shortcomings of OOXML”, item 3).

What keeps the microsoft .doc format proprietary is not a patent on the document format itself but the fact that Microsoft does not release information on the document format and repeatedly changes it making reverse engineering to get perfect compliance more difficult. However, Microsoft is working to eliminate this issue by making parts of it’s new document format , OOXML, patented and therefore even more propietary. Hence the importance of the fight between ODF/UOF and OOXML as document formats. The sucess of the document format, as before, will determine to which supplier the money flows.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

#56

Aye, it didn’t wash with Poser’s EULA and the Poser users although Curious Labs tried it.

#57

Might, or might not. Depends on your jurisdiction, the court, the nature of the EULA, and how the EULA is presented.

http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Contracts:_Click_Wrap_Licenses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EULA

#58

What keeps Photoshop poopular is not universal product superiority compared to free and commercial competitors but simply the network effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect