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

Vader quote.

[u-bend]

"There IS no Conflict"

Re:Vader quote.

[HermMunster]

Only veiled lies are part of any Microsoft statement about interoperability. Microsoft wants proprietary and it to be theirs to lock you into their OS and their technologies. This is not new. Let us be wary of the fact that Microsoft wants the IP from the open source community and are willing to extort it through blatant lies about IP violations. An attorney I spoke with just today while we were discussing this informs me that Microsoft's failure to disclose the patent numbers is essentially abandonment.

Microsoft has been trying to extort IP from the open source. That's their only reason behind the threats. The Open Source community doesn't need to agree to Microsoft's terms. Microsoft needs to agree to the Open Source communities terms, or whomever has the IP. Since the Open Source community has little to no reason to cross license and are willing to remove any infringing code, Microsoft has no choice but to pay up to open source.

It will be pretty funny when everyone comes to the realization that Microsoft has a significantly greater number of IP violations than open source does and they'll refuse to pay up when the time comes for the disclosure. They simply claim that the open source community didn't pay up when they were given a chance so Microsoft decided to play judge, jury, and executioner and make the balance themselves.

Microsoft is like the big oil company threatening to sue the individual car driver, and any major company that uses cars, because those people are using gasoline that may be refined using some portion of their process that wasn't "allegedly" legally licensed. It doesn't matter that this big oil company probably stole the process to begin with. Nor does it matter that they won't tell you which part was infringed so the process can be adjusted.

Microsoft's motives are not altruistic. They are not after interoperability. They are after the IP of these companies intellectual property. It is that simple. It is method of extortion. This moron that is in charge of the IP section is obviously crazy.

Hmmm ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

'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.' I think he forgot 'And that's why we're threatening to sue people ... to ensure we have interoperability in courtrooms.'

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?

In other news...

[sconeu]

• War is Peace
• Freedom is Slavery
• Ignorance is Strength

The Interoperability Executive Customer Council

[psema4]

TIECC - This Is an Exceedingly Clumsy Concept.

What does "Interoperability Executive Customer Council" mean? An interoperability "council" of customers' executives? An executive council of (for?!?) customers?

Try as they might, I cannot see how M$ can declare war on either side of the Patented/Open software fight. Do they really think that they can exist in both camps at once and still come out a winner?

If I'm not mistaken, the Art of War deals pretty specifically with choosing one's sides/opponents carefully.

If they wish to push for interoperability, why threaten (however thinly-veiled) the Open Source community? Particularly when they themselves are "trying" to be more open?

Did Microsoft just wake up?

[anubi]

Ok... Imagine Microsoft did indeed start flinging litigation all over the industry...

Then any adopters of Linux ( rest of world ) will be afraid of "embracing" Microsoft, for fear of the lawyer letter in the mail.

Then Microsoft is relegated to an American-Only protocol with not a helluva lot of political clout outside the US.

This will leave businesses which have embraced the Microsoft Representative with a crippled system incapable of communicating to every customer.

Unlike open source, which will.

The businessman who shook the hand of the Microsoft rep may have to stand before the CEO and explain why he should keep his job, given the company's competitors can talk to everyone, and his company, under his signature, can only talk to a subset of the customer base.

The handshake with the Microsoft rep could be the handshake of death for many corporate CIO, as the love of universally compatible systems - and systems open to verification of their operation - become the norm.

Microsoft has now shown their hand... its got claws in it. Do you want to trust it? The smiling face of someone anticipating getting you into their cat trap could turn into a gun pretty fast if it doesn't get its way.

I don't expect the American government to do much, but I do expect compatibility with the rest of the world will do it.

When you live to face the ramifications of your selections, ignorance is NOT bliss.

..brings up a current topic; non-logical stances.

[mollog]

This seems to be a very widespread phenomenon; apparent illogic in public positions.

At even the hint of a suggestion that Microsoft has made a living from using other people's ideas, Bill Gates will immediately start into a harangue about how Microsoft is a leader because of its innovation. As most people familiar with the subject (and not predisposed to believe what Microsoft/Bill Gates says) already knows, Microsoft is not an innovator.

Many very big corporations like Microsoft, and all politicians, have learned to make statements that are based on false logic, falsified logic, and plain illogic. Big Tobacco denying the link between tobacco and cancer, Big Oil explaining their profits. I'll leave the political stuff alone because that seems to bring out the trolls.


That Microsoft will openly state that there is no tension between its 'support' of open standards and software, and their other work which supports and extends 'closed' technology is not a surprise. But what disappoints is that this rather open hypocrisy seems to be so readily accepted, especially by the mainstream media.

Have we become so jaded that truth and fact no longer matter? Am I the only one who tires of this open hypocrisy?

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).