Aug12
I use OpenOffice Writer, which is freely available and infinitely redistrituable. Which is good, because a Texas judge just told Microsoft to stop selling Word.
I use VLC for watching DVDs, which is freely available and infinitely redistributable. Which is good, because a federal judge told RealNetworks to stop selling RealDVD.
First they came for the proprietary software, and I didn’t speak up, because didn’t use proprietary software. Then they came for the free software, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
While I am not a lawyer… I am fairly certain that VLC’s ability to decode DVD’s is illegal in this country unless they are paying the proper royalties (what are the chances?) and OpenOffice very likely infringes on the same patent that Microsoft has been charged with.
The difference? Commies like you think you’ll be safe from the patent trolls so long as there isn’t any money to be had… and sadly you’re probably right… for now
This post points out that both Microsoft and Real exists as single-points-of-failure in the delivery chain for office productivity and media tools, respectively.
The OpenOffice and VLC repositories are more resilient than that.
Regarding VLC/Real, Real’s problems come from its apparent agreement to abide by decisions by the DVD consortium, which I don’t think VLC was foolish enough to agree to.
“and OpenOffice very likely infringes on the same patent that Microsoft has been charged with.”
From my understand of the first paragraph of the article, .docx is an open source format copyrighted (or often refereed to as being copy”left”ed), by I assume Sunsystems, and therefore under the terms of use that comes with most open source software can’t be distributed for commercial purposes.
Though, Microsoft could make the argument that, like computers that come with Linux pre-installed, they are selling proprietary formatted software that “comes” with open source for free.
Someone correct me if I am wrong.