Microsoft Getting Paid for Patents in Linux?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday February 11, 2007 @04:30AM from the now-wait-a-minute dept.

kripkenstein noted an Interview with Jeremy Allison where the interviewer asks 'One of the persistent rumors that's going around is that certain large IT customers have already been paying Microsoft for patent licensing to cover their use of Linux, Samba and other free software projects.' and Jeremy responds "Yes, that's true, actually. I mean I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using [...] But they're not telling anyone about it. They're completely doing it off the record."

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A time for the lawyers by conlaw · 2007-02-11 04:44 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Now it's time to bring in those big class-action firms and sue M$ on behalf of the whole 'nix community for breach of the GPL. If Linus himself were to be the named plaintiff, it might get the attention of some of the sheep out there. No more "Heil, Microsoft"?