Microsoft Getting Paid for Patents in Linux?

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."

Comments

Re:Why shouldn't they ?

[numbski]

D'oh. Found my answer:

http://ubiqx.org/cifs/SMB.html

"Like NetBIOS, the Server Message Block protocol originated a long time ago at IBM. Microsoft embraced it, extended it, and in 1996 gave it a marketing upgrade by renaming it "CIFS"."

Short answer: I have it backwards. SMB is the "open" one. CIFS is what you get after MS does their embrace and extend act on it. Ooops. Sorry for the misinformation!