Ballmer Repeats Threats Against Linux

daria42 writes "Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property. In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world.""

Comments

Re:Details, Ballmer or it ain't so

[jeevesbond]

IBM is still digging into SCO's near corpse to find the detials of SCO's accusations. Which were, are and for ever more shall be totally bogus.

The difference between the two cases is SCO claimed copyright infringement whereas Microsoft is claiming patent infringement (I believe).

Software patents are so much more vague than copyright, so there's a good chance some of the GNU/Linux operating system is infringing. Remember the study that found 283 possible software patent infringements in the Linux kernel alone? I would be suprised if some of those didn't belong to Microsoft (and that was 2004, there are probably more now).

This public sabre-rattling is not without basis. Seems to me that Microsoft are keeping the specifics under wraps, then threatening companies with them in private. Remember what ex-Novell employee said in this interview? Here's a reminder:

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, which they then cannot redistribute.

It's also funny you should mention this:

Otherwise Microsoft looks like a bigger SCO.

Some people (including this respected legal blogger--at the bottom of that article) believe Microsoft funded and put SCO up to its anti-GNU/Linux FUD litigation. So, really they are a bigger SCO!