Another day another Microsoft patent deal

Another day another Microsoft patent deal

Posted Jun 14, 2007 8:16 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Another day another Microsoft patent deal by mikov
Parent article: Another day another Microsoft patent deal

For your customers there's no option. If they buy software they stand to be sued for patent infringement.

For example, you might buy Windows XP for a large company, and then a few months later you receive a letter explaining that you owe five million dollars to a company which holds a patent on some spurious audio processing technique. Your options are to hire expensive lawyers to defend you, or call Microsoft and ask them to defend you. Microsoft loses and spends a few billion dollars on patent licenses for all its past and future customers, and that puts up the price of your next copy of Windows. Not a hypothetical, that's more or less what /already happens/

If you buy from one of the major commercial Linux distributors, you can expect the same experience. There is a small chance of being sued, and if you are sued because of their software, not something your sysadmins installed from a dodgy third party repository, then they'll come to your aid in court on more or less the same basis as Microsoft.

Microsoft has already predicted that this eventually means the end of the software industry. They're just planning to be the last man standing. The patent system is hopelessly corrupt, it strongly resists attempts to reform it, and those with their snouts in the trough will do everything possible to keep it that way.

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