Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Sounds like Microsoft is going to war.

Looks like Microsoft is going head strong after the Linux and FOSS community. Microsoft has stated that Linux and the FOSS community has infringed on 235 patents that Microsoft owns. It appears that Microsoft won't inform the community which ones. I'd guess that they worry they won't be able to shut us down if we work around the patent issues. At the same time Microsoft has declared "The Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn't exist in 2007. ...". It appears that Microsoft doesn't understand what the community is. They do understand the business part of the community but fail to understand the rest of us. But it's doing it's best to make sure it attacks us in all directions. On the one hand they say we're irrelevant. On the other they seemed worried that we're a dangerous foe that must be destroyed. Either way there's a storm coming and it's going to be a big one. Microsoft is a control freak and it doesn't like that it's not in full control of everything PC even if it's not their own. They think this is their sand box and that we don't belong there. I hope that the community can stick together on this, what we lack in funds I hope we overcome by the collective ingenuity of the community and possibly other ways. The one thing we can fully expect is that Microsoft will continue to attack and they won't give up easily. They will use what they've learned from the SCO (their sacrificial lamb?) case and try to grind the community into the ground. They will use the court of public opinion, the media (they are the masters of FUD), Congress, the Senate and the courts. They will use their money to their advantage and to the consumers disadvantage. This is not to say that the community should be allowed to blatantly abuse valid (non-obvious) patents. The question is, what are these patents? Are they non-obvious? Are they valid? Microsoft wants reparations and wants the Open Source community to pay.

4 Comments:

At 5/15/2007 4:35 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is just the dirty way of M$ to play, they are just making noise against Open Source because the Vista sales are on the floor, and the just very scare because DELL will be shipped with GNU/Linus Ubuntu... are you afraid M$... play clean... better pay the use of Xeros, IBM, Apple patents...

 
At 5/15/2007 5:53 PM, Blogger Neil Cherry said...

M$ doesn't know how to play nice. I can only expect that they will pull every trick in the book. I'm sure they won't reuse what SCO did (as it didn't work out so well) so we're in for some new tricks.

InformationWeek has an article on Linus Torvalds Responds To Microsoft Patent Claims. It's an interesting read.

 
At 7/02/2007 4:18 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Please learn when to use "their" as opposed to "there" -- different words, different meanings.

This has been a helpful message from the friendly blog grammar service.

 
At 7/02/2007 5:43 PM, Blogger Neil Cherry said...

Eek, it is the grammar nazi! ;-)

Looks like I deserved that one, after all I did ask for folks to point out such errors. :-)

I have corrected the misuse of there/their but I'm sure I'll make the mistake over and over again. I often catch myself but, obviously, not often enough.

Thanks

 

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