Ballmer on Linux

theodp writes "'In the Linux world, nobody stands behind patent claims,' warned Steve Ballmer, saying that Microsoft customers would be protected from the $550 million Eolas patent infringement judgment. 'I'm not trying to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt,' said the CEO of the company who earlier cried wolf about breaking IE in the wake of the Eolas judgment, prompting the W3C to go to bat for the software giant."

Comments

OS at odds with MS again, no surprise there..

[Space cowboy]

It's interesting to note the arguments on groklaw that an OS strategy might actually have *less* to fear than a closed-source one, compared to Mr Balmer's "It's not really FUD, honest" intellectual property FUD.

Also, reading the article, either the writer is unsympathetic to MS, or Balmer is really putting out some mixed messages ... eg:
"Ballmer scoffed at arguments that his company's operating system creates a computing monoculture" vs his statement "Microsoft's platforms offer better interoperability with the company's other technology".

Sounds like he's been spinning so much, he's dizzy :-)

Simon.

just my 2 cents

[erotic_pie]

just the fact that microsoft so quickly denounces Linux should tell you something

The next great thing?

[neomac]

Ballmer singled out XML and Web services as the "big breakthrough" of the next decade that will spur innovation.

Puh-lease. I was at the introduction of XML and CDF back in 1996/7 by Microsoft. They also handed out 4.0 beta disks of IE 4.0 at the event. I think it was called World Wide Live.

MSFT's gone nowhere fast with XML, while the rest of the developer world embbraced and extended it. They (MSFT) finally decided on a strategy for it what, three years ago? And now it's going to be the next big thing of the coming decade?

No wonder Linux runs circles around the Redmond Behemoth...

Re:Linux to Ballmer

[big ben bullet]

i've only got one 1 to add

developers
developers
developers
developers!

and that's that!

Necessity is a Mutha

[ackthpt]

Avast, ye bloomin' brine-swiggin' picaroon!

it'll stink for a few years, and then it will fizzle away as developers agree that there's a better solution than the patented one anyway.

Which, when you think about it, has been the intiative behind lots of great development, if you don't like the toll road, dig your own and many fine things have come of this. Further browsers like Mozilla and Opera progress while IE stagnates.

Re:FUD?

[kalidasa]

Anybody else notice that the quote cited by parent under "uncertainty" presupposes that OS customers would be lawsuit targets of patents? Under what legal theory do you sue the customer of an infringing product? If the customer has customized the product is what I guess is the legal theory behind this statement - in other words, if you have the source code of an application you're using and you modify it and re-release your changes into the world, you'd be liable for patent claims against that code. Gives both the SCO lawsuits and Microsoft's own recent patent hunger a whole new sinister meaning - if you're not a Microsoft customer, you'll be a Microsoft/SCO/other "patent"-holder target. Upping the ante from BSA, I guess.

I think a ruse is going on at Microsoft

[Stevyn]

I think at least the top heads at Microsoft are running macs with os X over there. They really have no clue about how windows or linux works for the end user. I'm sure when you're at that level of any company you end up becomming so disconnected from the details of the product you sell. I doubt the Ford executives test drive every new model of a car, but if these cars' tired suddenly blew out on the highway, they'd call in their engineers and ask them what the hell's going on. I don't have any inside sight on how Microsoft works, just a view from the outside like many. For anyone who works there, do these managers at least look at how their products are working and the amount of headaches they cause people all over the world? Or is it all just to get it out the door and market the hell out of it?

What about quicksort?

[rsilvergun]

Imagine if that was patented. It's been shown to be the fastest sort possible, if I remember right. Or how about all those patents apple has on Font Rendering? There's lots of stuff in Math that there's only one way of doing right. That's why you weren't allowed to patent algorythms in the past.

Re:What about quicksort?

[Gleef]

rsilvergun asks:
What about quicksort? Imagine if that was patented.
Quicksort was (first?) published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery in July, 1961. It's safe to assume it was invented before then. Any patent on it would have long expired.

It's been shown to be the fastest sort possible, if I remember right
On some sets of data, perhaps. There are many sorts that are comparibly fast (faster for some data, slower than others). If you restrict the kind of data you're sorting, there are much faster algorithms.

One of my favorites is the Radix Sort, which was half invented by IBM, and half organically developed by their punch card tabulators towards the beginning of the 20th century (generating statistics for the US Census). If you're sorting on a numeric key field with a fixed number of digits, you do a fast stable sort on the least significant digit of the key, and then sort on the next most significant, and so on. You can sort large amounts of data in O(nk) time rather than O(nlogn) for Quicksort, plus, you can use the sort by hand on physical objects, Quicksort is hard to do without a computer.

Microsoft. Software patents. Mono

[dpilot]

Mono scares the living daylights out of me.

Given the triviality and obviousness of patents being issued today, there's practically no way Mono can be non-infringing. Yet it's even more dangerous to check for it, because then you get into a triple-indemnity situation. Letting Mono burrow its way into Linux culture, software, infrastructure, and support is ASKING for trouble a few years down the road. It's putting a giant SUE ME sign out.

Besides, "Microsoft done right" isn't aiming that high. We could do better.