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Ballmer Suggests Linux Distros Will Soon Have to Pay Up
An anonymous reader writes "Via Groklaw comes comments from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer at a UK event, in which the company once again threatens Linux distributions that haven't signed up with their program. '"People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week ... Ballmer praised Novell at the UK event for valuing intellectual property, and suggested that open source vendors will be forced to strike similar deals with other patent holders. He predicted that firms like Eolas will soon come after open source vendors or users. Microsoft paid $521m to settle a patent claim by Eolas in August.'"
And if this is the same article I just read elsewhere (I don't have the time to read TFA now) MS didn't threaten anyone. All they said was basically "if you sue us for patent infringment, why don't you sue open source gang also?" So no threats, they are just asking that others should also suffer because of stupid patents.
You don't know what you don't know.