have you all read this?
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...23390#comments

cheers

I don't even have original comments for the ridiculousness of that (but like some other commenter wrote, "MS can 'su' me all they like..")-- instead, just picture me here laughing hysterically!

MS - More money than brainS

Yet more proof that MS is trying to take over the world...

We don't talk about shady practices in Linux-General - Microsoft have to go to big General so they can't steal our ideas.

As I said in other thread, they're going to patent Linux and Mac and BSD and all the other OSs and all the other software. And then, the evil empire will have accomplished its goal.

Quoting the article that OP linked,

I just wouldn't say "in the US", because it's no better in other countries, at least those I'm familiar with. The word "ridiculous" is too soft here.

Maybe they'll next patent the user account of highest privileges, i.e. root account.

Meh...

I'd like to see MS enforce that patent seeing as the "prior art" has already been around and in use for so long.

Now I know what you get when you have 100 monkeys typing at 100 typewriters.

in all fairness, i think this patent is for a gui implementation of privilege escalation.

Hmm.. Perhaps if I patent BSOD I can sue MS for millions? Unless they have actually patent it all ready. But that's a joke in it self, so.. :P

That's absurd!!! For fax ache, somebody stop them before it's too late.

Fairness?
So don't gksudo, gksu and kdesu fall into that category?

From what little I read before I got bored, it sounds like this patent is for the method that Vista uses when you try and run something from a non-admin account that requires admin privs, i.e. you run it and when it discovers that it needs admin privs it automatically pops up a dialog listing the admin accounts and prompts you to authenticate as one of them in order to continue.

In contrast, both su and sudu (and their gui counterparts) are initiated by the user in order to swap to another userid prior to running a specified command.

That aside, it's a fairly obvious and trivial idea so granting a patent for something like this is just silly anyway. But then, the US patent system is completely bonkers and has been granting patents for all sorts of silly stuff for years, so par for the course.

^ software patents are awsome. imagine if i patented the idea of a digital file so that any program that makes use of storing data on a digital file i would get a royalty.

fair enough, i was correcting previous posters.
i am not familiar with gui methods of using sudo (is typing sudo really that hard ?