Microsoft Sees No Conflicts With Patent Initiatives

AlexGr writes "According to Eweek's Peter Galli, Microsoft sees no contradiction between its open-source community building efforts and the more-than-thinly-veiled legal threats at Linux and other projects. Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, actually states: 'One makes the other possible, especially at a time like this, when interoperability is so important. Microsoft recognizes the importance of interoperability, which is why we are doing the things we are in our products, why we created the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, and why we are listening to customers.'"

Comments

How could it?

[DoofusOfDeath]

"Microsoft Sees No Conflicts With Patent Initiatives"

MS is a corporation. So among other things, we know that:

(1) It doesn't actually "see" anything. It's comprised of individual humans (mostly) that see things.

(2) Because it's actually a collection of minds that don't necessarily agree with each other, it doesn't tell us much that it's engaging in two actions that are potentially un-reconcilable. When we hear that a *person* "sees no conflict", we find that interesting because we figure maybe the person has discovered some reason that they two ideas in question can be reconciled. For a corporation of multiple persons, maybe no such reconciliation of the two ideas exists.

Plus it's also quite plausible that MS management has private motives that are very different than its public motives. In that case perhaps the (inauthentic) public motives are in logical conflict, but the private motives held by MS's management are actually completely self-consistent.

What?

[peipas]

So they're thickly veiled threats?

Law in economics

[DrYak]

(2) Because it's actually a collection of minds that don't necessarily agree with each other, it doesn't tell us much that it's engaging in two actions that are potentially un-reconcilable.

There needs to be a law in economics that states that any corporation big enough, will starts to show symptoms of the corporate equivalent of Alien hand syndrome once it has crossed a specific size.

The recent mix-up at Microsoft (one hand is trying to be nice to open-source because FOSS is the current hyped buzzword of the day while at the same time the other hand is desperately trying to find a way to crush this "evil" concurrence that threatens to overthrow them from their dominant position in the market) is a perfect illustration of such dual minded corporate behaviour (for the exact reason stated above : it's made up of too many people to have a single coherent goal).