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The last battle? MS goes after FOSS with patents

Oh fab.

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users.

See http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm

(Software) patents that (IMHO) shouldn’t exist in the first place, but that’s not the point I want to make here. Companies now need to compete on speed of innovation and “getting it out there”, not on ability to hide, hoard and protect some perceived advantages. The above will just cost a lot of money, hinder innovation, annoy users, and in the end everybody loses. What a sad waste of energy.

Posted on 5 Comments

5 thoughts on “The last battle? MS goes after FOSS with patents

  1. Long overdue really as you always knew it was coming…

    Not really, Novell have protected its SUSE users by an agreement with Microsoft, and as the door is open at present any other FLOSS vendor can do the same. It may be lying with the devil but at least you protect your users ongoing

  2. As the article correctly notes, this is very dangerous territory for MS to march into. It is quite plausible that they will lose, and lose badly; and then what? And if they win? Development is stifled for a while, perhaps quite seriously, but eventually the OS community works around the supposed infringements.

    But damn software patents are a pain…

  3. In 2003, I quit telling people this would happen because nobody would listen. If OSS gets seriously hurt or even destroyed by this, it would be sad, but serve you all right.

  4. Of course it would happen, and nothing would have prevented it. Getting possible patents researched is prohibitively expensive, and there’s also the triple damages issue.

  5. Groklaw, for what it’s worth, is seriously underwhelmed…

    http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070513234519615

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