Microsoft makes claim on Linux code

[DasFox]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that every user of the open source Linux system could owe his company money for using its intellectual property. The statement will confirm the worst fears of the open source community.

http://www.out-law.com/page-7494

P.S. Sorry if this was posted already, as I did not see it.

ALOHA

 

[doze]

wow
This is not an agreement between companies ? we can still sue each other for any number of reasons ? but ultimately our respective customers needed peace of mind to make decisions

 

[Hyperblaze]

The psychological warfare between Microsoft and the Linux Community has now taken a new direction.

Who wants popcorn?

 

[Ika]

I actually laughed out loud.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Nice follow-up by MS to their arranging the $50 million in funding for SCO's attack (still winding through the court system).

FUD++ ;

 

[potato28]

WTF? Im pissing myself laughing right now over this...

 

[HomeAppraiser]

Is Ballmer going to try to patent the wheel next?

 

[Greenman]

God but I hate MS. Nothing would make me smile like seeing them go down in flames.

 

[xanis]

Originally posted by: Greenman
God but I hate MS. Nothing would make me smile like seeing them go down in flames.

...Along with basically every buisness, consumer PC and government installation in the world.

 

[kamper]

This is rather misleading.

Ballmer was explaining the rationale behind that deal. "Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered," he said, according to Computerworld. "This is important to us, because we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance sheet liability."

Nowhere once does he imply that he is going to trying to extract money from any linux users. In fact, signing the deal with Novell wouldn't make sense at all then, they would do better just suing Novell's customers. The above quote says to me that they are fairly unlikely to do anything particularly evil any time soon. If Novell wants to play their patent arsenal game, that's Novell's problem.

 

[Nothinman]

The statement will confirm the worst fears of the open source community.

What fears? If MS was going to attack someone for infringing on their patents they would have done it already or at least they wouldn't have signed on with Novell without some pretty big alternative motives. That's the nice thing about OSS, the code is out there for anyone to look at so MS has had all of the time in the world to go through an audit.

And the worst case scenario for most people is that if something is found to be infringing it just needs to be rewritten. The obvious candidates for this are Samba and the Linux kernel support for NTFS, smbfs and cifs. And IIRC CIFS was submitted to the IETF for standardization so they'd probably have a hard time attacking that one.

And from the part that kamper quoted, Ballmer hasn't made any claims about anything other than he feels that Linux customers don't know if they infringe and with the new deal only Novell customers can be confident that nothing bad will happen even if they do infringe. Essentially Novell has just bought insurance for their customers just in case MS does hit blackjack. And it probably gives Novell the clear to pursue some things that other developers have avoided because of potential violations, but I don't know enough to speculate accurately.

...Along with basically every buisness, consumer PC and government installation in the world.

And that statement should cause a big light to go off in everyone's heads about how important open standards really are.

 

[drag]

It's just MS doing FUD and it'll back fire.

They are getting people's attention and when Microsoft doesn't act on their statements then everybody will just assume it's more bullshit from Microsoft. In situiations like these for Linux there realy is no such thing as bad publicity.

That is a lot of people don't realy understand how important Linux is now. Since they dont' see it on their desktop or don't hear about it in the news they assume that it's still just a up and coming. Now more people are going to understand that it runs much of the nation's infrastructure, that it runs the most powerfull computers in the world, that it's in a third of all servers sold, etc etc etc.

The big part is that now it's worth it to Microsoft to pay 240+ million dollars to Novell in order to generate FUD to try to convince them NOT to use Linux. So if Microsoft realy is done that there has to be a reason why they SHOULD use Linux.

That is why pretty soon you'll start to see the effects of Balmar being told to STFU and you won't see him so much after this.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: HomeAppraiser
Is Ballmer going to try to patent the wheel next?

IMO, MS has very little to stand on unless they can document actual code that was taken from them and used in the Linux kernel at some point. Reverse-engineering specs and standards is generally allowed as long as you are not using inside information to do so. However, IANAL.

Though this does remind me of a great article from The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29130?issue=4227&special=1998

 

[kamper]

Shuttleworth kicks it up a notch

 

[Nothinman]

Shuttleworth kicks it up a notch

Pretty ironic considering that Ubuntu has been violating the GPL by distributing pre-compiled versions of the nVidia and ATI drivers for at least one major release and supposedly Feisty will enable them out of the box.

And I thought this reply was pretty good: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg03788.html