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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Microsoft Patents Sudo? Groklaw

Groklaw reports.
Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that's been in use since 1980 and wasn't invented by Microsoft. Here's Wikipedia's description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft's description of its "invention".

The article contains a reprint of Wikipedia's summary of the history of the Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X) Sudo utility and claims that Microsoft's patent is bogus because of this prior art and that Microsoft must have known about Sudo.

NB: From 2009, but I only found it in January 2012. I've adjusted the post date appropriately.