Microsoft May Become Major Opponent of Patents?

Posted by Zonk on Friday October 7, 2005 @05:10AM from the birds-gotta-fly-fish-gotta-swim dept.

UltimaGuy wrote to mention a story positing that Microsoft may one day be a major opponent of over-reaching patents. From the article: "Speaking at the LinuxWorld conference in London on Wednesday, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, said that although Microsoft is seen as being very pro-patent at the moment, if every other software maker enforced its patents in the same way then Microsoft would find it very difficult and expensive to do business. 'I think in ten years you will see Microsoft become a major opponent of patents and we will see very large software vendors turn around their position on patents,' Shuttleworth said."

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I asked Bill Gates about exactly this, this summer by Jakob+Eriksson · 2005-10-07 05:43 · Score: 5, Informative

I was at the Microsoft Research Intern BBQ at Gates' house this summer. Part of the time, a bunch of us were standing in a big nerd horde, with Gates in the middle, having a Q&A session.

I asked him something like "What is your position on software patents? Specifically, do you think Microsoft would be better or worse off if software patents did not exist?"

He went off on a 3-5 minute ranting monologue about how capitalism has been proven a better idea than communism, and that not having software patents is something that belongs in soviet russia, not in the U.S.

I think it'll be a long time before Microsoft changes its position.