Tweet
The Chinese Linux website linked this incident (https://linuxtoy.org/archives/chines...d-granted.html) and fortunately one of the authors of the patent is able to speak up about the details of this issue.
rant
I'm aware of the fact that one of American's core value -- if you don't speak English, go home -- is probably highly honored here. I'll translate two commentaries he have above.
/rant
"Let me explain this issue as one of the developers. When we started this project, it was 2009, and based on wine-1.0. At that time, there is no support for wine on ARM architecture. We did not submit any patent by the time when we finish. However, when the final project was handed to our customer -- China Mobile -- they require us to have minimum patent submitted throughout the process of this project. To fulfill the requirement, we have to submit this as a patent. We did not check if wine have any sort of support for ARM before we submit and that's why we encounter this issue."
"The goal of this project back then was to support running WINCE apps on Android. This is not suppose to be the intent of the WINE official porting to ARM. We have to implement a major library in WINCE: coredll, based on MSDN. Wine doesn't and have never include this library at all."
If what he claimed was true, then this issue is purely an violation to LGPL rather than stealing other people's code for patent. As he claimed, their goal was different and implementation is independent. Later comments referred to this issue in that blog suggested that this is a serious LGPL violation: 1 modifying without releasing the code in LGPL 2. submit a patent for a project that should have been released under LGPL.
The comments that developer gave later also suggest that they're looking into retract the patent and publishing their modifications in LGPL.
My point of view: if he was serious, which he sounds like, this is more LGPL violation rather than intentional cheating on the patent.
rant
I'm aware of the fact that one of American's core value -- if you don't speak English, go home -- is probably highly honored here. I'll translate two commentaries he have above.
/rant
"Let me explain this issue as one of the developers. When we started this project, it was 2009, and based on wine-1.0. At that time, there is no support for wine on ARM architecture. We did not submit any patent by the time when we finish. However, when the final project was handed to our customer -- China Mobile -- they require us to have minimum patent submitted throughout the process of this project. To fulfill the requirement, we have to submit this as a patent. We did not check if wine have any sort of support for ARM before we submit and that's why we encounter this issue."
"The goal of this project back then was to support running WINCE apps on Android. This is not suppose to be the intent of the WINE official porting to ARM. We have to implement a major library in WINCE: coredll, based on MSDN. Wine doesn't and have never include this library at all."
If what he claimed was true, then this issue is purely an violation to LGPL rather than stealing other people's code for patent. As he claimed, their goal was different and implementation is independent. Later comments referred to this issue in that blog suggested that this is a serious LGPL violation: 1 modifying without releasing the code in LGPL 2. submit a patent for a project that should have been released under LGPL.
The comments that developer gave later also suggest that they're looking into retract the patent and publishing their modifications in LGPL.
My point of view: if he was serious, which he sounds like, this is more LGPL violation rather than intentional cheating on the patent.
Comment