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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."
More FUD from MS Desperate times call for desperate measures. What to say, Microsoft is getting desperate. To be coming out making direct statements like this show's that Ballmer is worried about his future; he really screwed up with Vista.
Daniel Lyons has been suspected of being a SCOX puppet for Microsoft for quite some time now. And people have been suspecting that Microsoft has been funding this sort of talk in the SCOG - IBM case as well. Can't wait for the discussion on Groklaw
What Ballmer is saying is this: if (and that's a big if) there's patent or IP imfringement anyhere in the Linux kernal, they'll look into it and take legal action if they have to. Should MS not enforce their rights, they're hosed and the stockholder get's POed. It's a sound business decision and, frankly, so obvious that it should not have even been reported. It falls into the "duh, no shit, sherlock" category. So what else is new? This ain't FUD people, this is business as usual.
Who exactly do you sue? Linus Torvalds? Stallman? A bunch of working class coders who send in patches in their spare time?
I think the best analogy for Microsoft's current situation is when Apple was struggling to come out with Copland. At that time, Apple flailed around a lot trying to figure out ways to make money. Ultimately, they concluded they needed to find a way to start all over with their OS. Microsoft will wind up doing the same, eventually.
In the meantime, let's hope their flailing won't harm Linux.
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These patents simply stifle competition and therefore advancement, so it stands to reason that Microsoft, being the kind of company they are, will practice underhanded methods such as this.
They are simply incapable of any real innovation and never have been, so they stifle and steal ideas and use marketing muscle to sell it as thier own.
I'd say these methods have a limited lifespan, as is clear with Vista.
They are being beaten to the punch due to lack of this innovation, by Apple, by Google and by Linux.
No amount of FUD or threats is ever going to stop that, time to move over microsoft, as your going to be played at your own game and your going to lose.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
and by they I mean Microsoft's management. At a time when their status quo has lead them to a debacle with Windows development, all Ballmer can think of is lobbing bombs blindly at the enemy. He's proven himself to be no real tactician nor to have a good eye for managerial talent.
I own stock in Microsoft and want to see these asses go. Stop wasting my money on threats against Linux and start getting Vista out. You idiots cannot get blood from a turnip, which is about what your suits against OSS developers will amount to. The only way to keep the value of my stock up is to develop a product that brings in more revenues, and suing Linux developers won't do that.
Fuck you Ballmer, Allchin, etc.
-From a shareholder who sees right through your wag the dog campaign to CYA.
He didn't state that he's sure that Linux has violated Patents, but he's saying that if they did (as some experts say), they would be forced by their shareholders to take action. This is entirely true and will always be true in every situation. If someone materially infriges on a corpoations patents and there are substantial damages to the corporations ability to make money, the corporation has a duty to it's shareholders to enforce the patents. Balmer really doesn't have a say in this matter he has to act.
No Sigs!
This is just puff - if MS ever resorted to that, IBM would have to dust off their extensive patent collection and retaliate.
that merit is unecessary in the said lawsuit (see SCO) but only need to generate enough FUD to halt or slow adaptation.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Lyons hand fed him this question. It was something he wanted to talk about. You think that he would have commented otherwise.
I'm sure this is review for most of us, but this is the end game right here, right now.
Microsoft has been hoarding patents, regardless of prior art, for some time now. The patent office will grant a patent, when it's not contested. They have 4000 or so now....
Now comes the fun.... litigate.... and do so against open source. Leaving the cost of this litigation with the large Linux vendors who's pockets are not nearly as deep as Microsoft.
And here's what they bank on: They can bankrupt the Linux movement financially, regardless of whether the patents would stand up, simply because there are so many of them.
Will it work?
It will work unless there is more pressure put on Microsoft than defensive litigation. There has to be a market reaction. There has to be people walking away from Microsofts product on large scale basis. There has to be PR from the linux side that's almost as dirty as FUD.
Sadly, I think we are going to lose this war for the time being. And that is not easy to say: Because it means that I will literally be out of a job and unable to continue in business. I'm an independent consultant and mini-ISP.
Imagine if Ford wasn't trumped by GM in the days of "Any color but black"?
In the Ford/GM days there was a corrective force in the marketplace through GM's product response. I'm not sure that today's consumer is ready/educated enough for that choice, I'm entirely sure that the courts really won't understand these issues for another generation, and I know Microsoft will not restrain itself based on the greater good.
Linux is in my mind equivalent to GM's product response in the Ford monopoly days.
If Microsoft is successful in a patent assault on Linux and FOSS in general, it will effectively remove FOSS from legal use in the United States, and probably many other western countries.
And here's the upshot: Countries like China, Tiawan, Thialand, pretty much the entire pacific rim and 3rd world countries are NOT going to respect US patent rulings. Leaving the USA at a competitive DISADVANTAGE as FOSS development moves OFFSHORE along with it's USAGE and REVENUE.
People need to really think about what is happening here. This is about more than business and patents. This is about freedom and the good of our markets.
What if Gutenburg took control of what was printed on the press? What if Gutenburg had absolute control over the press and it's design?
The computer is just another printing press. We all need to vote with our feet and dollars to prevent a catastrophe in the free market from happening- and if it happens, it will be in the name of Microsoft Shareholders.
Think about it.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
But it is FUD. The term has nothing to do with the accuracy or fairness of claims; rather it is used for claims intend to discourage people from using a product regardless of the merit of the claims. Here, Ballmer is by his own admission only speculating that Microsoft could sue. Why not simply look into it and sue or not sue? Because this way, he can pre-emptively discourage the use of Linux.
English is easier said than done.
Yeah, you're right, Microsoft should sit around and allow its IP to be stolen, if that's the case, by a bunch of self-satisfied nerds. Maybe once you're old enough to have a job, you'll understand the ways of the real world.
Which IP? TAB handling? Virtual desktops? Wearable devices?
99.9% of MS IP is shamefull stealing from long existing projects. Name one real IP invented by MS.
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Linux/OSS isn't playing Microsofts game.
Sue all you want. Open your war chest of patents and fire away, Have IBM join the fray and fire back with an army of lawyers and tons of prior art. Drag Donald E. Knuth to court and have him confess that he came up with large parts of the stuff everybody claims to have a patent on. Force people to join patent ammo interest groups and have 10-20 wisecracks come forward who've managed to pass "pattern-matching" and "bit-vectors" passt the patent office clerks, ready to sue MS to chunky kibbles - or step down for a mean xx million sum.
Be it that in the end, 50% of Linux is actually 'illegal code'. 'Illegal' as in 'patent-thought crime'. Illegal as in 'may never use FAT' and 'may never use CF12xx encoding for characters.'. And so on. But never forget:
Linux/OSS isn't playing Microsofts game. It's not about money. It's about nice computer stuff that's fun to lots of people. It's about software that does interesting things, not about making money. It's made to work without money. It's about PHP. Mozillla. Python. Blender. Not about Money.
MS won't survive as a software-only company. They can sue, burn 5-10 billion and set back desktop Linux by a decade. And they have to if the shareholders demand it. But they can't win. Because OSS is not playing their game. OSS has more IT expert manpower than MS can even dream of. And it's machinery is fuled by passion, not money. That's what scares the piss out of MS.
"... then they fight you. Then you win." QED.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Seems like a death cry to me. When a sofware company can't get it's own software working properly and turns to filing more and more patents just so it can sue other companies that is a sure sign that something is terribly wrong. Is Microsoft going to become a huge version of SCO? Rather than making products they'll just try to cash in on anyone else that tries to make a product. To bad they're big enough to cause a lot of damage on their way to the bottom.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I think Ballmer is a clown, but here is what was actually said:
Question 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?
Question 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.
This statement does not imply that the only strategy is a legal recourse. It doesn't imply that the strategy will not be a legal recourse either. It just means that MS will have to look at any problem case by case.
You can't handle the truth.
The best tactic available to Microsoft right now isn't in talking up the new features of an OS that is not going to be released any time soon, it is in putting the shadow of a possible lawsuit against a player in the Linux space. That way these same players may decide to hold on to their cash to defend against possible lawsuit instead of spending it on Marketing, Education, and Manpower.
Microsoft has to slow down the Linux competition now that their OS is delayed, it's just damage control. By forcing their competition to hold back funds for "just in case" MS is ensuring those funds aren't spent in the areas that will give Linux the greatest returns in marketshare during this down time.
Lawyers are way more expensive than marketing, theoretically this move could cut into next year's budge as well for some of these companies.
A successful public business has a responsibility to its shareholders to use every available avenue to maximize corporate value.
Bullshit. I don't know where poeple like you got the idea that companies have some obligation to a certain course of action.
Don't spew shit about fiduciary duty. The truth of the matter is the people running the company have great latitude to make decisions about the direction of the company. They can't blatently steal from their shareholders, but they can very easily say "Hey, maybe we shouldn't sue people for using obvious patents, that would cost us more in public image than we would gain".
Under your skewed world view, companies that didn't go with the absolute lowest bidder on every contract would be strung up. Companies that build their image based on environmental friendliness can't exist, etc.
So don't feed me that bullshit. People running any company never have their hands tied from doing anything except the most blatently irresponsible and illegal actions.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That's the whole point of this discussion. Ballmer doesn't actually make an argument. Arguments can be directly addressed and refuted. What he did here is put the notion out that Linux is infringing on their IP and is due for a lawsuit from the 800 lb gorilla without actually saying anything at all. Whether that notion is true or not is immaterial.
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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi
Hopefully we're in the fighting stage
Windows XP is fast, (relatively) stable, pretty, and easy for the average user.
.net2.0, MSSQL Server 2005, biztalk.
.net 1.x to 2.0). This is a challenge given the Windows community worships on the altar of compatibility and many windows depelopers are change-averse.
.net managed code...etc... and now all that is left is a pail fuzzy inkjet printout of the original vision.
.config files.
XP can be MADE to be fairly fast, but it can even more easily be made to be a big, slow pig.
For some time hooking up a stock XP machine to the 'net would bring it crashing to a worm-infested halt within minutes--literally. XP has reached a point of stability but for a great deal of its lifetime it was unstable as hell--mostly because of its massive vulnerability to exploits and "turned on by default" philosophy regarding services.
Whether XP is "pretty" is a matter of taste--I personally find the default gummybear, theme-by-fisher-price look repulsive.
Microsoft has kept it patched and updated (to some degree), and provided a service pack for some larger upgrades.
Perhaps with the latest IE vulnerability they should reach for a higher degree. SP2 was definitely the right move but the truly correct thing to do would've been to put much of what was in SP2 into XP in the first place.
And at the same time they've released several versions of media center, tablet pc, etc.
This is not innovation. This is the same old garbage with fresh new garbage piled on top...and they have been midle commercial successes at very best.
All the while building the tools for their future strategies, including VS.net 2005,
This is Microsoft's biggest saving grace--they make some top-notch developer tools. I really think that if it were not for Visual Studio that not even monopoly-induced inertia could keep them secure as industry leader. Ballistic Ballmer was right on the mark when ha ambled around the stage, stomping and beating his chest yelling "developers! developers! developers!". The only thing is that their future strategies seem a bit hard to pin down...that and they've on occasion pissed off said developers by throwing compatibility to the wind (a lot of depressed VB6 coders out there...and there are a number of annoyances in migrating from
What is it that you need so bad from Vista other than 3d desktop graphics?
Almost nothing at all. Vista was hyped as a big new thing...then MS suddenly had to pay attention to security and put out some big fires and "reload". Oops...no time for WinFS...gotta cut back on the ambitios rewrite of system componenets in
There is one thing that is welcome...and that is the deprecation of the registry and DCOM...but both are still there. At least there are supported, standard alternatives in Vista in the form of Indigo and XML based
XP will still do everything my MacOSX box will do (and much faster) and with the proper tweaking, it'll do everything my Ubuntu laptop does as well.
XP will do it "good enough". It just does a mediocre job of most things. My experience with Macs as of late is limited but I really notice little difference speed-wise, considering the amount of eye-candy that OS X (which I also find a bit off-putting once in awhile).
Windows XP is a great operating system, and I'm glad to have something stable enough that we don't have to upgrade every year
Except that we actually do upgrade it in a sense--every month when Windows Update has a round of patches to install.
MS has a problem on its hands really...it has slipped into managin Windows a bit like an open source project--it is updated often but rarely is there a ground-up, major reworking. It has made XP into a mediocre but (finally) stable and usable OS, and if MS just kept issuing updates and service packs it would evolve into what could be considered a true quality product. The problem comes in because
Those pesky customers, who want to do things like run their old games with decent performance.
Astounding as it might seem to you, Microsoft actually *are* interested in keeping their customers happy and have a long history of going out of their way to do so.
According to studies, Linux does infringe on a lot of patents. In a certain study infringement of 283 patents were found and out of these 27 belonged to Microsoft. Even Richard Stallman has been mentioning this in interviews as well as in talks, thus giving the claim some credibility in my eyes at least.
Since SCO is now in everyones seen as a Microsoft sock puppet, even the Redmond company realizes that it would look incredibly silly to continue using SCO as their megaphone for spreading Linux FUD.
Microsoft is at a crossroad right now. People, companies and governments have started demanding a lot more software freedoms in the last few years and it's clear that Microsoft can't tackle the "Linux threat" (i) in the same manner they've tackled all other competitors since their beginning. Since Microsoft's hand is more or less forced right now they seem to have no other option (at least given their current business model and unwillingness to become a service company) than to pull out the patent card. This might very well be a Pandora's Box, since there are a lot of big companies having a lot more patents than Microsoft who are betting a substantial part of their future on GNU/Linux. However Microsoft currently only has three options.
1) Sit back and watching their market share shrinking (due to many factors such as regulations of software freedoms in certain countries and general sway in corporate attitude towards freedom).
2) Become primarily a service company, backed by software which is still lacking in the OSS community (ii)
3) Start a legal battle to slow down the inevitable, allowing a few more years of enormous margins.
Now clearly option 1 is out of the question since it flies in the face of any Harvard MBA. Option two is not something Mr. Gates is very comfortable with and will likely not happen while he and Mr. Balmer still has significant influence over the company's direction. So They're left with option three...
i. Linux happens to be a manifistation of software freedom which looks tangible enough for Microsoft to grasp, since it can apply the typical corporate stratagem of having a "threat" and an "enemy". Tacking these labels to the real reason for their headache namely "freedom", would not play out very well as a media stunt, nor for their own employees I would guess.
ii. The future of proprietary software is in my view to fill whatever gaps exist in the OSS offerings at any given time or to invent (iii) new useful stuff. However the OSS community will catch up eventually if the applications are of enough use which means that the "software aspect" of a company who relies on proprietary stuff will have to raise the bar and / or find other gaps to focus on more quickly. It's all good in my view since it would likely accelerate the development pace in the industry.
iii. By invent I don't mean the buzzword / marketing term for "refinement" but real innovation.