Re: [tlug] Novel embraces Microsoft

[stephen@example.com]

Godwin Stewart writes:

 > Not filesystem-related, but network protocol-related. Remember that
 > SAMBA was originally an open-source implementation of Microsoft's
 > (proprietary and presumably patented) SMB protocol for file- and
 > printer-sharing.

Protocols per se are interfaces.  The elements are just names, so
can't be patented; they're not expression (there's only one way to
name each protocol element), so they cannot be copyrighted either.

However, particular implementations of the operations named by the
protocol may be patented, and of course the code used to implement
those operations is copyrighted (unless deliberately dedicated to the
public domain).

This is not entirely a difference without a distinction.  If the
patented operations are in some sense "advanced", then it may be
possible to produce a "basic" implementation without violating the
patent.  It's also likely that you could produce a complete
implementation, and a court would only force you to disable the
advanced operations.

For example, Ghostscript did this with GIFs.  Before the patent
expired, Ghostscript provided a gif-writing device which accessed the
same (unpatentable) interface as a certain popular free GIF library
did, but by default was linked to an implementation which wrote a GIF
header (unpatented) and a trivial LZW dictionary (each bit is
interpreted as itself).  Since it was the encoder that was patented,
not the dictionary protocol, Unisys could do nothing about it.

Of course many thousands of people (not including yours truly, PNG did
everything I needed, thank-you-very-much) munged the Makefile to link
to giflib, but that was Unisys's problem, not Aladdin's.

 > > Think about it.  How many programs are there that let you access
 > > files over a network?  More importantly, how many programs are there
 > > that have no interaction with the file system?
 > 
 > No, the more important question is, how many of them emulate a patented,
 > proprietary protocol to do their job?

Exactly.  Subject to the caveat above.