Ballmer Won't Dismiss Idea of Suits Against Linux

An anonymous reader writes "According to an interview with Steve Ballmer in Forbes, Microsoft is open to the possibility of filing patent suits against Linux in the interest of their shareholders. Ballmer said: 'Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy.' Microsoft filed more than 3000 new applications for software patents in 2005 and already owns more than 4000 patents, including many patents on fundamental, but trivial technologies, like double clicks."

Comments

much ado about nothing

[winkydink]

You mention intellectual property. What's going on in terms of Microsoft IP showing up in Linux? And what are you going to do about it?

Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy. And when there is something interesting to say, you'll be the first to hear it.

All you're seeing in that answer is "we have an obligation to our shareholders to protect our rights if we're being infringed". And if there's something interesting to say (in the mysterious future), he'll let Forbes know about it.

Taking that comment to mean MS is threatening to sue various companies over Linux infringements is akin to screaming the sky is falling when a bird shits on your head.

Re:More FUD from MS

[johnMG]

As GNU/Linux gains marketshare, Microsoft will become more and more desperate, and the teeth will *really* come out.

This is related to why I like the way GNU handles their official projects: you assign copyright to the FSF when you contribute to GNU projects. This means that the buck stops with them. They own the copyright, and they are doing the distributing. If MS wants to sue them, my guess is that RMS (or another FSF rep) will go to bat and either the patent will get nullified (dunno the correct terminology there), or else unfortunately the "offending" code will be removed and be re-written.

If there's no one single copyright holder (but rather, a big bunch of copyright holders), do they all have to go to court in such a lawsuit? Hm.

Hopefully, lots of cases like this will go to the courts, and hopefully enough fair judges will see the frivolity of so-called "software patents" that we'll see some sanity come back to the patent system.

Re:More FUD from MS

[ivanmarsh]

I wouldn't call this FUD so much as common sense.

If there was any common sense when it comes to patents no one would be able to patent something as trivial and global as a "double-click"... or something they didn't invent for that matter.

Remember: MS sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their applications... and won.

Xerox innovated (to use an MS BS term) the drop-down menu. Hell, VisiCalc16 for the Apple IIe had drop-down menus in it.

Obviously any company should be able to protect their IP... but the patient office shouldn't let companies patent something they didn't invent.

double-click patent only for handhelds

[TekGoNos]

Microsoft's double-click patent only applies to buttons on handhelds (or, as they word it : "limited resource computing device", and later "Small, mobile computing devices, such as personal desktop assistants including hand-held and palm-type computers and the like").
And if I interprete the patent correctly, even then, only to physical buttons.

And I still think that the patent is bogus.
(You know, it's an innovation because ... well ... everybody did this, but never on ... well, you know ... small, portable computers. Yeah, there, it's a complet novelty.)

Re:Not Sound business, total FUD...

[justsomebody]

Doesn't matter, a patent is a patent.

Really?
1. It can be overthrown as prior art.
2. It is not valid worldwide. EU doesn't recognise SW patents for example.
3. Too much of business already depends on Linux for this to go down without a major incident. IBM, Novell, Sony... They won't just let MS take their piece of pie without a fight.
4. They are being trialed as monopolist, meaning... they are in disadvantage and enforcing this would mean that accusation is having merit.
5. OIN. Look at the patents MS breaks there and read what OIN is.

If you want to blame someone, blame those who allow such patents to exist.

Guess what. I'm from EU ;)

A successful public business has a responsibility to its shareholders to use every available avenue to maximize corporate value.

Yeah, they could start making better products if they want to achieve this goal.

This step with patenting issues would be valid if it was taken before companies started depending on Linux and Linux was just a hobby OS of willing hackers. Now is just a futile attempt (pissing against the wind), which is not to be taken seriously.

I know that in your idealistic world, a "good company" just wouldn't register these patents, but that's not reality.

[sarcasm] Yeah, this is probably the reason why SCO is winning. [/sarcasm]

Do you know what FUD is?

[spun]

FUD is a good acronym: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. What other term would you use to express the concept? It isn't name calling, it's simply stating what they are doing. If they want to sue, sue. There is no reason beyond spreading FUD to announce that "We might sue."

The article isn't misguided, Balmer is. Precisely because he is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt rather than, say, useful information about the merits of his product and how it has better features than Linux. Therefore, claiming that Balmer is spreading FUD doesn't distract from pointing out why he is wrong, it IS why he is wrong.

I'm now thinking that perhaps you didn't know what the acronym stood for and took it as some kind of insult. It's the only way to explain your lack of comprehension as to why the term is accurate. That or you are some kind of Microsoft sock puppet who is deliberately spreading FUD about FUD.

Re:Do you know what FUD is?

[timeOday]

So concentrate on explaining why his arguments are wrong.

Why? Ballmer didn't put any effort into his scaremongering, why should anybody go to the effort of refuting it?

Seriously, it bugs me when somebody throws out some baseless assertion, and then says "prove me wrong." Ballmer, if you want us to believe that Microsoft has grounds for suing Linux, feel free to start making your case at any time. Because as things stand, Microsoft has been on the wrong end of a lot more rulings than Linux (or any other open source project).

Re:Do you know what FUD is?

[spun]

What he is stating is business as usual, not newsworthy. There is no reason to state such a fact unless you are trying to discourage people from using Linux without the expense of actually filing a lawsuit. If Microsoft wants to file suit, that would be newsworthy, and not FUD. Simply restating general business practices such as "We sue people that infringe on our IP," or "Product X may infringe on our IP," serves no purpose but to scare away potential Linux users.

I can see no reason for Balmer to make this statement except to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Linux. Can you imagine some other reason for him to state such a thing? Yes, we are calling his motives into question.

You see, his arguments aren't wrong. Microsoft could sue Linux. That isn't the issue. The issue is, why even talk about it rather than simply doing it? Balmer's motives are the issue, so it is completely legitimate to posit that his motives are to spread FUD. Doing so counters his assumed motives and puts the ball back in his court.

Not FUD? Then sue. Won't sue? Then it's FUD.

Without an actual lawsuit, there is nothing for potential linux users to fear. We are not trying to counter his arguments, we can't. Microsoft could perfectly well sue Linux. We are trying to counter his unstated goals by countering the fears he brings up. If they wanted to sue, they would have.

It's FUD until they actually sue. Then we can worry about winning the argument that Linux infringes on Microsoft IP. Until then, we will simply say, don't listen to him, he's full of FUD.

Re:Do you know what FUD is?

[Hal_Porter]

In the UK, McDonalds sued to green activists who demonstrated outside one of their stores, handing out leaflets. Most of the information on the leaflets was legally pretty dubious - the UK has strict libel laws, and the slightest untruth opens you up to a lawsuit. McDonalds spend a fortune on lawyers and the activists defended themselves. McDonalds technically won the case, but it was a public relations disaster, and they have no hope of recovering any of the costs, not even the ones they were awarded (the real costs were much higher)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case

I suspect that any Microsoft litigation against Linux would prove much the same. And they seem to have been severely chastened by the anti trust lawsuit, so I'd predict they wouldn't want to do anything which would be perceived as crushing a competitor.

Additionally, sueing one of the Linux vendors would encourage patent pooling and dragging in IBM's patent lawyers, and that would be very bad for them, given that they are sitting on far more cash than any of the Linux vendors. Oh, and it's much easier to remove offending code from Linux than from Windows.

And Microsoft hasn't as far started a patent lawsuit, they have only been on the receiving end of them, and they got into the patent business fairly late and are thus at a disadvantage.

So I think even if they had a cast iron case of patent infringement, they would probably decide not to persue it.

Re:Good

[pieterh]

Bzzzt. Wrong.

I've never heard of a patent lawsuit where the defendant was allowed to inspect the plaintiff's source code for other random violations. It probably made sense when you made this up but it's not the way the world works.

Take random huge Linux user, e.g. a large bank that runs 70% of its servers on Linux and is migrating the other 30% as fast as it can. Now produce a patent with 17 claims. Now if large bank cannot disprove each and every one of these 17 claims, they must stop using Linux immediately, or pay whatever the patent holder asks. It is up to the defendant to break the patent claims.

Microsoft will not enforce their patents, if they have any that they think undercut Linux, not because there is any real defense (there is not) but because they will wait until Linux is well-enough established that the patent negotations will go smoothly.

Patent licenses are a large planned revenue stream for Microsoft, and they are only possible when there is a large captive public of infringers who keep infringing. Thus, Linux growth is actually good for Microsoft, seen from this point of view.

Where the whole lovely effice collapses is when we see that for ever dollar MSFT can hope to earn from licensing "their" IP in this way, they will spend ten times that fighting and settling patent ambushes.

Patent holders have a huge power. Look at NTP's extortion of RIM. Microsoft think they can use this power to extort future Linux users. But it's a very risky gamble because MSFT are a lovely target for extortion themselves.

Re:Mono is now DEAD

[despisethesun]

The point just flew right over your head, didn't it? Microsoft more than likely has software that violates patents that OIN members hold. If Microsoft starts patent litigation against Mono, it risks the same litigation in return from OIN members. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that Microsoft will not "KILL MONO", because doing so would be very, very costly.

Also, Mono is not "in Linux". It is an application which can be run on a Linux system, and is included on a handful of Linux distributions. This does not mean it is "in Linux", as there are versions for Windows, Mac OS X, *BSD, and Solaris.

Re:Microsoft is flailing

[ansible]

But that's solvable now -- they could spin up an entire virtualized copy of XP in a VM. It'd be slow, but it'd at least work.

Doesn't even have to be that slow. With Xen, you taking only a small performance hit, 2% to 8%.

The trick, of course, is to get the VM guest OS applications to interact with the rest of your system in a seamless fashion.