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Microsoft Will Not Sue Over Linux Patents
San Muel writes "In an official statement, Microsoft has said it has no immediate plans to sue after alleging patent infringements by open-source vendors for the time being. The company goes on to say that, essentially, it could have done that any time in the last three years if it wanted to. So what's the purpose of these bold announcements? '[John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org marketing project lead] added that while Microsoft may not have plans to sue, it could be using the threat of litigation to try to encourage corporate customers to move to those open-source product vendors with whom it had signed licensing agreements, such as Novell. "Microsoft has spent time and money accumulating patents. Maybe it has started using that armory to move corporate customers to open-source software that Microsoft approves of."'"
Unless they actually do something libellous in their campaign there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
However their threats are empty, and only likely to sway companies still entrenched in the 'threaten to use open source to secure discounts' camp.
The big problem for Microsoft is that they are no longer the big player they once were. They know this, and this is an ill judged attempt to say they are still in charge. It's only to be expected.
Unfortunately words don't mean much when money is at stake, even their most devout customers will start to become edgy if they see competition moving to open source solutions and saving money. There is no loyalty where money is concerned.
Here
What the researcher is saying is the with 235 potential patent violations
Linux scores lower then most proprietary software he has looked at.
Incidently nowhere does he say who owns the 235 patents so given the amount of
Operating System related patents filed they are more likly to belong to IBM or HP
(DEC VAX, Tandem Non Stop etc. etc. ) than microsoft.
Pure FUD!
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Laches
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The business model of threatening to sue people works if the people are 12-year-olds. It does not work real well if they are the pillars of finance capitalism. So as a party engaged in annual "be very afraid" tours, you're going to start to get pushback by enterprise customers who say, "That's *us* you're threatening."
Now what if you could reduce their sense of being the people who are made afraid? What if you could find a way to give them quiet and peace -- and make a little money on the side -- so that the only people who are left quaking when you did your annual "Be Very Afraid" tour were the developers themselves? Now you would have given yourself a major ecological boost in swinging your patents around and threatening to hurt people.
Deals for patent safety create the possibility of that risk to my clients, the development community. If enterprise thinks that it can go and buy the software my clients make from some party who gives them peace from the adversary in return for purchasing a license from them, then enterprises may think they have made a separate peace, and if they open the business section one morning and it says "Adversary Makes Trouble for Free Software", they can think, "Not my problem. I bought the such-and-such distribution, and I'm OK."
This process of attempting to segregate the enterprise customers, whose insistence on their rights will stop the threatening, from the developers, who are at the end the real object of the threat, is what is wrong with the deals.