2007-05-01 21:56:55

Microsoft wins one of the biggest victories for OSS lobbyists

Microsoft has fought one of the biggest battles for OSS lobbyists today. In a case they won, the US Suppreme Court has overturned its decision from the AT&T case with a 7:1 majority.

The actual case was whether or not software in its source form is patentable. The US suppreme court has ruled that source code itself is like the blue print for a device: it is pure information and cannot be considered patentable.

This basically means that Microsoft has won this one special case, where they infringed on a patent held by AT&T itself, which covered speech synthetization in software. Nevertheless, this court ruling will be a big problem to Microsoft in most of their business strategy, since they just successfully invalidated software patents on source code, a vast majority of their anti-Linux strategy is jeopardized.

More information is on http://www.betanews.com/[...]_Overturned/1177944397


Posted by Tonnerre Lombard | Permanent link | File under: news, politics