How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

[GreyGeek]

That question was asked by "Trap", whose postings I read in the talkbacks to this article by SJVN.

Bottom line: He expects a class action lawsuit soon.

I don't. The simple reason is Microsoft's EULA, and the fact that several have tried to sue Microsoft in the past for defective and vulnerable software. Click this and see for yourself.

[67GTA]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

The EULA takes care of most of them. The spam angle is interesting though. I keep waiting for someone to notice their home grown bios AML compiler that breaks ACPI for Linux/MAC. Most hardware vendors are using it now to compile the bios against their hardware, and ignoring the Intel AML compiler (IASL). I have been battling this for some time by manually editing bios dsdt files for people. I stopped doing it because custom dsdt support has been dropped in the kernel. The only way to do it now is to compile your own, and I DO NOT want to start giving support for custom compiled kernel problems. My current HP laptop suffered from several ACPI bugs due to MS's AML compiler being used by Nvidia to populate the bios dsdt. Luckily they have all been fixed in later kernels because I filed bug reports against the mainline kernel. Be sure to view the PDF from the first link. You can check if your bios has been compiled with MS's compiler by running

dmesg | grep MSFT

MSFT is Microsoft's. If your lucky, it will return nothing.

http://www.osnews.com/story/17689/Bi...rk-with-Linux/

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...highlight=dsdt

[67GTA]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

EDIT: It seems that if ufw is enabled, it fills the dmesg output with firewall logs and doesn't even log boot messages. This has to be a bug. Be sure to disable ufw and reboot before running

dmesg | grep MSFT

You can also turn off ufw logging

sudo ufw logging OFF

to keep it from filling dmesg output.

[GreyGeek]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

Interesting ....
Here's mine:

jerry@sonyvgnfw140e:~$ dmesg | grep MSFT
[ 0.000000] ACPI: XSDT 00000000b7c10f10 00054 (v01 Sony VAIO 20080605 MSFT 00010013)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP 00000000b7c04a90 000F4 (v04 Sony VAIO 20080605 MSFT 00010013)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC 00000000b7c0ff10 0006C (v02 Sony VAIO 20080605 MSFT 00010013)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: MCFG 00000000b7c16c90 0003C (v01 Sony VAIO 20080605 MSFT 00000097)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: HPET 00000000b7c16c10 00038 (v01 Sony VAIO 20080605 MSFT 00010013)
jerry@sonyvgnfw140e:~$

But, my Sony VAIO is running flawlessly with Lucid Lynx, except for its "Pro Magic Gate" USB port that has proprietary locks on it -- which I never use because Sony included 3 perfectly good USB 2.0 ports on it.

[67GTA]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

It is getting a lot better because of the decision to not support custom dsdt's. This forces people to file bugs against the kernel instead of privately fixing it. I remember a flurry of VAIO and Toshiba bug reports with 9.10 when custom dsdt support was dropped. Hopefully you benefited from those coming downstream like me.

[GreyGeek]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

I'm sure I did because it was during the middle of 9.10 updates that my Sony really started delivering what the hardware was capable of. The last month of updates in Lucid Lynx has really made this box fly!

[MoonRise]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

This is my new laptop:

[  0.000000] ACPI: DSDT 00000000b7ecb296 0C490 (v01  ATI  SB700 06040000 MSFT 03000001)
[  0.355960] ACPI: OEMN 00000000b7ed8c69 00173 (v01 AMD  NAHP   00000001 MSFT 03000001)

Sad to see that M$ playing that game, but I don't expect less. That is their "Modus operandi" to seem to support. Then extend it and then latter drop support for the original. I see the same for this.

[GreyGeek]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

They probably patented that compiler and will, no doubt, add restrictions against reverse engineering the output of the compiler.

That's when some one or some group should sue the PC OEMs for restraint of free trade for submitting to the extortion by MS.

[zlow]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

They probably patented that compiler and will, no doubt, add restrictions against reverse engineering the output of the compiler.

That's when some one or some group should sue the PC OEMs for restraint of free trade for submitting to the extortion by MS.

Seriously? Sue the vendor because they used a Microsoft compiler to build a DSDT? Good luck with that one. Have you filed a bug report against the compiler? Reverse engineering is legal dependent upon how it is done.

[dibl]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

Seriously? Sue the vendor because they used a Microsoft compiler to build a DSDT? Good luck with that one. Have you filed a bug report against the compiler? Reverse engineering is legal dependent upon how it is done.

I dunno about suing, or who would do it to whom, but the cited Pamela Jones article says this:

"There is no fair use or reverse engineering exemption with patents. So you can argue all you want about how you had a fair use right to reverse engineer under copyright law, but if the part of the software you reverse engineered was also patented, you are, with some limited exceptions, sunk. "

which is, AFAIK, exactly true today.

[zlow]

Re: How much longer will it take for Microsoft to get sued?

Seriously? Sue the vendor because they used a Microsoft compiler to build a DSDT? Good luck with that one. Have you filed a bug report against the compiler? Reverse engineering is legal dependent upon how it is done.

I dunno about suing, or who would do it to whom, but the cited Pamela Jones article says this:

"There is no fair use or reverse engineering exemption with patents. So you can argue all you want about how you had a fair use right to reverse engineer under copyright law, but if the part of the software you reverse engineered was also patented, you are, with some limited exceptions, sunk. "

which is, AFAIK, exactly true today.

This is very true in regard to patents, but reverse engineering is not generally required to discover methods or process to re-create a patented invention. It is murky water, as first sale doctrine doesn't cover patents but reverse engineering patented technology has never been tested in court that I know of.