With U.S. Patent 7,536,726, Microsoft has been granted a patent with which they hope to make a successful business model out of a potentially severely restricted operating system.
Under the title “Restricted software and hardware usage on a computer,” the U.S. Patent Office granted Microsoft innovative invention status on May 19, 2009 for their resourceful business idea. Microsoft had filed the patent in 2005 and now the ideas of its coworkers Joachim Kempin, Carl Gulledge, Edward Stubbs and others were finally considered worthy. The patent text, in all its arcane language, gets to the bottom line of a concept not totally unfamiliar to Microsoft: make selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to users or limit their ability to add software applications or device drivers until an “agreed upon sum of money” is paid to “‘unlock’ or otherwise make available the restricted functionality.” The patent seekers see this as a safeguard against the following situation: “One problem inherent in open architecture systems is they are generally licensed with complete use rights and/or functionality that may be beyond the need or desire of the system purchaser… [so that] users with limited needs pay the same rate for these systems as those with universal needs.”
June 13th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
In this day and age – when everybody is looking for ways to have more for less, microsoft manages to do the opposite – i write software for the windows platform and i can’t wait for the official reactos os release.