Another day another Microsoft patent deal [LWN.net]

Another day another Microsoft patent deal

Posted Jun 9, 2007 18:57 UTC (Sat) by marduk (subscriber, #3831)
In reply to: Another day another Microsoft patent deal by mikov
Parent article: Another day another Microsoft patent deal

You know there is a big difference between the current situation and the BSD, trademark, and SCO incidents. In those situations there were actually lawsuits. Here, at least right now, we have no law suits. In 16 years I don't know of any Linux user/company that has been sued for patent infringement.

Fact: A lot of companies are giving away their patents to OSS for *free*. Yet stuff like this somehow doesn't get as much press as "Oh you violate 235 of our patents but I'm not going to tell you what they are, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to sue you either."

Fact: Microsoft made a quick-motion PR move and (so far) 3 companies flinched. That's all I see right now. The very few companies that signed deals with SCO were victims of the same circumstance. And any threaten-to-sue based revenue model is certain to get you a little business with very little investment. Unfortunately companies in the U.S. (tech or otherwise) do it all the time. IBM did it to Sun (using patents), got some cash, and moved on to the next victim. But it didn't kill Sun and it didn't kill Unix (Linux & Windows are to blame for that ;-)

Fact: Companies like Microsoft, Sony, Research in Motion, et. al. get sued all the time regarding patent infringement, yet no one is crying over them. Compare the number of lawsuits WRT closed-source software vs. OSS: DivisionByZero.

But seriously, are we letting the cart get ahead of the horse? Right now a vast majority of Linux users & distributors are feeling nothing but a little warm air (I wouldn't even go so far as to call it hot air). It's PR, FUD, what have you. Right now all you can do is some reverse PR. You can't counter sue because there's no lawsuit. Some people are just letting a few spoken words get out of hand. I'm not saying any situation is completely unlikely. I'm saying look at things at face value. So far we have no disclosed patent infringements, no lawsuits, a *tiny* percentage of companies that use Linux signing deals with Microsoft, and a sh*t load of PR/press and a lot of dog wagging. So who is the *real* victim here?

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Another day another Microsoft patent deal

Posted Jun 9, 2007 21:17 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

What can I say ... Although I am not fully convinced yet, there is no denying that what you are saying makes sense. I really really hope that you are right :-)