Chinese People Try To Patent Wine On ARM

[PankajKumar]

I think we should cut them some slack. They are some of them very hard working. Plus they have a very high patent registration rate and make a really lot of products. its a different matter most of those products dont work

[b15hop]

Haven't the Chinese built their domestic business around copying Western stuff for years now? They've been ignoring patents left and right, haven't they? This feels hypocritical to say the least. And yes, I realise this is a subset of the Chinese people, but I think the irony still stands.

I hate patents anyway. And wine sucks too. So who cares.

Whoever they are doesn't matter. The real problem is the patent trolls. People with money to buy patents for the sake of pissing everyone off. Regardless of nation.

[lovenemesis]

I was contacted by the one of the authors of this patent. His team recorded a series of video clips showing what they accomplished:

http://www.youku.com/playlist_show/id_22122332.html

The clips show that existing WinCE applications written can run on Android system through their implementation of wine arm.

I don't follow development of Wine ARM in Wine community closely. Thus not exactly sure what's the difference between their implementation and upstream one.

A side note, haven't received feedback from the employee of CodeWeavers in China.

[xeekei]

Haven't Americans been enacting laws against murder for years now? Yet there's this one American dude who killed another dude. This feels hypocritical to say the least. And yes, I realise this is a subset of the American people, but I think the irony still stands.

Murder is a human thing. This blatant copying of products is what China is known for, if you don't see the humour in this you must be a pretty boring person.

But sure, if you want to laugh at Americans, we could do that! Americans are funny too.

[mikeandmore]

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.

https://linuxtoy.org/archives/chinese-applied-patent-about-wine-arm-and-granted.html#comment-311699

https://linuxtoy.org/archives/chinese-applied-patent-about-wine-arm-and-granted.html#comment-311702

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.

[SSwolfenstein]

Not sure what help this argument of political correctness can bring.

You are too kind. But you don't live in Europe that's why you don't care. Things are much WORSE here.

[cjacker]

Actually, this issue was found and reported by a group of OpenSource Developers in China.

Maybe, China had fall behind in high-level technology these days, but please be nice and be considerate.

There are also lot of individial and free OpenSource Developers in China and had contributed a lot of codes to many OpenSource projects.

There are also lot of People in China that tried their best to defend/protect GPL and other OpenSource Licenses.

Ophone/COS/WineOnArm etc. such rediculous thing was done by some Chinese people and Company, but they DO NOT stand for "Anyone" in China.

Hate-China, even anti-China is allowed, it's your freedom, But I think you mean the GOV, right?

So, when you express your ANGER to China, please DO NOT express your ANGER to ANYONE/EVERYONE in China.

[eidolon]

Shall we rearrange our focus on how to protect this open source project?

That would be too constructive.

[lovenemesis]

Reported to CodeWeavers Chinese employee

Not sure what help this argument of political correctness can bring. But I just reported this patent with this story to one Chinese employee of CodeWeavers.
As a member of Wine project community and FOSS advocates, I hope this matter can be solved in a proper way.

Yes, CodeWeavers has someone in China, even though it's just one employee who has been a long time contributor to Wine project. In case you didn't notice, CodeWeavers has a home page in Chinese. It also adopted a AliPay, a popular online payment system in China, a certified Weibo account. All these localization effort is accomplished by a group of open source enthusiasts, who happen to be, guess, Chinese. I'm proud to provide some help during this, as a Chinese.

Patent system in China sxxks. And there are people who won't mind to disgrace themselves to patent others invention, if it could bring them even a tiny bit benefit. They really don't care whether it's come a open source project or a US company. They won't hesitate to do the same to another Chinese company, believe me.

Shall we rearrange our focus on how to protect this open source project?

[dee.]

Planet earth is divied in countries.
Nationality is a significant characteristic to inform people reading articles who you're talking about.
And some anxious people in here call it racism?
Rediculous.

There is real racism out there. Fight that and don't satisfy your conscience by trolling about racism in an article about some chinese guys trying to archive dubious stuff.

A white, middle class heterosexual man is the best judge of what is racism and what isn't.