Microsoft Tries Hard To Play Nice With Open Source, But There's an Elephant In the Room

Esther Schindler writes: They're trying, honest they are. In 2016 alone, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Microsoft announced SQL Server on Linux; integrated Eclipse and Visual Studio, launched an open-source network stack on Debian Linux; and it's adding Ubuntu Linux to its Azure Stack hybrid-cloud offering. That's all well and good, he says, but it's not enough. There's one thing Microsoft could do to gain real open-source trust: Stop forcing companies to pay for its bogus Android patents. But, there's too much money at stake, writes sjvn, for this to ever happen. For instance, in its last quarter, volume licensing and patents, accounted for approximately 9% of Microsoft's total revenue.

Comments

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do Android royalties have to do with Open Source? It's not open source coders who pay Android royalties. It's big cellphone companies. This is a very contrived opinion piece. Why not broaden the topic and talk about all the companies who milk open source for a profit and not just one. I.E. the most profitable company in IT who have the biggest margins they could narrow a bit...

Re:It can't happen

[Rob Y.]

Perhaps. But your chemical patents were patents on actual inventions that your company, presumably, intended to manufacture and sell. Microsoft's patents are on ideas that are not particularly inventive - or original, and intended largely to stifle competition. The granddaddy of Microsoft moneymaking patents is the one they have on the FAT32 long/short filename setup. That patent is not there to prevent someone else from designing a crazy long/short filename scheme. It's there because that scheme is used by Windows, and anyone who wants their removable storage device to work with Windows PC's is pretty much forced to use it. So that patent was applied for and those lawyers were paid in order to enable extortion based on a form of monopoly tying that shouldn't be allowed in the first place.

If the software in question were significant enough to get people to pay for it instead of implementing it themselves, Microsoft could sell that software instead of extorting patent royalties. In the case of Windows itself, that's true. Anyone who wants Windows functionality has to pay Microsoft for the copyrighted OS software. Anyone who simply wants to plug an SD card into their Android device can use free software to do that.