With SCO out of the picture, Microsoft attacks open source itself

Posted by Daniel Stout on Mon 14 May 2007 at 7:58 PM

Well, if you haven’t heard the news, Microsoft wants to sue Linux and open source software out of existence. In the past, MSFT’s strategies haven’t worked too well. The SCO thing was pretty much a joke from the beginning once SCO couldn’t produce any infringing code. But Microsoft has spent the past few years applying for and gaining thousands of software patents. Now with a treasure chest of supposed intellectual property, they’re taking on Linux and open source software. Microsoft laid out their claims with Fortune magazine.

The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google, Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore.

The conflict pits Microsoft and its dogged CEO, Steve Ballmer, against the “free world” - people who believe software is pure knowledge. The leader of that faction is Richard Matthew Stallman, a computer visionary with the look and the intransigence of an Old Testament prophet.

Caught in the middle are big corporate Linux users like Wal-Mart, AIG, and Goldman Sachs. Free-worlders say that if Microsoft prevails, the whole quirky ecosystem that produced Linux and other free and open-source software (FOSS) will be undermined.

Microsoft claims that 235 of its patents are being violated. The question though that remains to be answered: how trivial are these patents? Here’s Glyn Moody writing over at Linux Journal:

Although Microsoft has not declared which of its patents free software supposedly infringes, you can bet a fair number will be on utterly trivial and obvious things – remember that a patent has been granted for the progress bar – that are used by practically every software program. Since they are so ubiquitous and trivial, the question then becomes why they were granted in the first place: patents by definition are supposed to be non-obvious as well as possessing novelty and utility. In other words, Microsoft’s threat of using software patents to attack open source is part of a far larger problem: the granting of software patents at all.

[…]

Once more people understand that software patents are just another kind of monopoly, with all the problems that this implies, they will also begin to appreciate why they should be strictly regulated, kept to an absolute minimum and ultimately abolished.

As Cory Doctorow says:

The Microsoft position is this: even if you don’t use Windows, you still have to pay them as much money as they would have gotten for selling you a copy of it.

And while we’re at it, here’s the link for making a donation to the Free Software Foundation who maintain the GNU Project among other things.

Tags: fortune · free software foundation · gnu · linux · microsoft · sco · software patents

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