Hacker News Reader

Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

As part of the BSA, they still lobby for software patents today.

The OOXML Office format they used to continue pushing Office lock-in is very recent: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_OOXML

They tried their best to keep the list of their Android patents secret, so that they could not be worked around, and they abused their patent on the FAT filesystem as recently as 2012: https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15...

They also still lobby against open standards: https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Public-Sector-IT/Microso... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/22/microsoft...

And lets not forget all the spying in Windows 10.

MS is as hostile as ever - it's a fantastic success of propaganda to make people think it's limited to "decades old issues".

View on HN

Less propaganda that the whole "do no evil" stuff.

Windows 10 telemetry is a child's game compared how much Google and FB spy on people's lives, yet most MS haters just jump of joy to use any tech that comes out from them.

Legions of US parents just put their kids under Google surveillance getting them Chromebooks.

OS spying is so much more invasive than application or service spying because you can’t opt out as easily. You can go without Facebook but a lot of people just need windows (for their jobs if nothing else, though I sure wish unity3d ran better on Linux and that more games ran smoothly on Linux)

The OS is also theoretically able to watch what you do in other services by monitoring keystrokes etc, where Facebook merely dreams of such things

I am not one of those MS haters - I dislike Google just as much.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-joins-open-...

Serious question: are there any major closed-source software companies (so like, not Red Hat or Canonical, etc) who don't lobby for or use software patents?

I consider using patents to extract payment a far lesser evil than lobbying for them. And an even lesser evil if the patent has some merit to it, and is licensed openly (i.e. no confidentiality terms to prevent revealing which parts of Android they claim to have patented).

As for your question - Cloudfront springs to mind - they're pretty loud about going after patent trolls, which implies they might not use patents aggressively. I'm sure there are many others, but a company not using patents to extract payment isn't something you hear about, so it's hard to tell. That said, despite filing for many patents, I haven't heard of Facebook actually using them against others. Which isn't to say they haven't done so (and possibly, like MS, kept the agreement confidential), and of course Facebook is hardly ethical itself.

Another poster says Microsoft joined the Open Invention Network, so perhaps in that area, they've reformed. Though they could still be lobbying for patents, which does much more damage to user freedom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com