Much of the open-source community was unhappy with the Novell deal, which it saw as a workaround to a widely used open-source license called the GNU General Public License.
More broadly, the free software movement saw the deal as an attack on one of its core tenets. Under the public license, once open-source code is incorporated into another company's technology, the new product must also be freely available -- a distribution model that Microsoft clearly doesn't support.
''Now it becomes possible to divide and conquer our community,'' said Eben Moglen, an attorney for the Free Software Foundation, the entity behind the GNU license. By making a pact with Novell, Microsoft also implied that anyone who downloaded or bought Linux from another vendor was doing so illegally.
The next version of the GNU license, currently in draft form, aims to stop similar deals in the future. Moglen said the draft states that if a company like Microsoft distributes open-source programs protected by the GNU license, it forfeits any related patent claims.
Open-source proponents are frustrated by Microsoft's repeated allusions to patent violations because ''they never say what patents being violated, never make any assertions, never put the evidence out there,'' said Larry Augustin, a technology startup investor who launched SourceForge.net, a prominent open-source development site, in 1999.
But Augustin also acknowledged that it's not in Microsoft's interest to do so: Open-source programmers could rewrite their code to avoid infringing on specific patents, or the courts could find that Microsoft's patent isn't valid.
If Microsoft were to start suing, it could also kick off a patent war on a grand scale. An organization called the Open Innovation Network, funded by IBM Corp., Red Hat Inc. and others, has amassed a vast number of software patents. In the event of a Microsoft lawsuit against open source companies or customers, the OIN would retaliate in kind.
''We believe it's highly likely that Microsoft would infringe some of our patents,'' said Jerry Rosenthal, OIN's chief executive.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
What I don't understand is why our Justice Dept. doesn't get some antitrust action against these guys. When you control something like 90+ % of
the desktops in the world that sure looks like
a monopoly to me.
devassocx
05/16/2007
Posts:52
this is 100% BS, and MS knows it. this is probably their reaction to Dell's decision to ship prebuilts with Ubuntu.
MS wont tell anyone what patents they're talking about because either:
A) they're full of s---
B) they know the free software community could easily rewrite the code to avoid the patents, once they know what it is they need to rewrite
they're just trying to squash a rival, and they cant do it with their products. the only option they have is patent trolling.
i didnt work for SCO and it's not going to work for MS.
brunascle
05/16/2007
Posts:68
Process based patents like Amazons "One Click" are exactly the same.
People should patent things that are are truly an innovation, not just a clever way of doing something.
sagema
05/16/2007
Posts:4
MS is just trying to be the 800 lb gorilla that no one wants to tangle with, by giving out threats of patent infringement.
Menus were around long before computers were even invented, so whats the big deal patenting a menu!
More Strength to the Open Source movement - May it never get squashed by anyone!
deejay
05/18/2007
Posts:23