Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek) [LWN.net]

InformationWeek reports that Microsoft doesn't want litigation. ""We're not litigating. If we wanted to we would have done so years ago," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's VP for intellectual property and licensing, in an interview. Instead, Microsoft wants to create more arrangements that mirror the company's deal with Linux distributor Novell. In November, the two agreed to share intellectual property and pledged not to sue each other's customers. "We created a bridge between two worlds that before were perceived to be unbridgeable," said Gutierrez."

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Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 15, 2007 18:49 UTC (Tue) by dobrien (guest, #36589) [Link] (4 responses)

"It's important for everyone to understand that there is a real problem with Linux patents and that there is a need for a solution,"

The only problem is that in the US patent office has (insofar) granted ridiculous, overly broad, frivolous patents to anyone that applied for them. The decision the Supreme Court made last month (or was it the month before) has probably invalidated most of Microsofts patents.

"Microsoft currently collects royalties from some companies that use Linux in their computing environments, Gutierrez said."

Is this an admission that Microsoft has been strong-arming companies into paying them for running Linux? Up until now they've denied this very claim.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 15, 2007 19:06 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

"Microsoft currently collects royalties from some companies that use Linux in their computing environments, Gutierrez said."

No, if you read this with the weasel-filters enabled, you realise that it means exactly what it says by a literal reading:
- Microsoft collects (patent) royalties from several companies
- Many of these companies use Linux (After all, who doesn't these days? Even Microsoft has dozens of Linux computers in a Lab dedicated for that purpose.)
- Nobody said the royalties are in any way connected to the use of Linux.

Of course, it is certainly probable that Microsoft has been making patent agreements with some kind of "this also covers use of MS IPR in Linux operating system" language inserted. To which the opposing sides lawyers would have thought "great, even Linux is covered and we didn't even ask for it".

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 15, 2007 22:06 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

Applying the weasel filters again, we can interpret "It's not the only way in which the problem can be addressed". They are saying that with MS's unlimited market power, you can play along with whatever they come up with this time, or something even nastier will be along shortly. It's a restatement of "it would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

They won't be suing anybody. Instead, they'll be shaking down business partners, threatening them with loss of various commercial perks. Magazines will publish innocent accounts of such "agreements", under threat of lost ad revenue. Initially, the shakedowns might not involve any money, but just "agreements" that may then be used to frighten later entrants. Some companies will jump eagerly, hoping to be one of those initial cheap "agreements".

The only real solution will be to file suit first, in a jurisdiction of "our" choice, for business interference. Then discovery will yield the patents (or lack of same). Probably the FSF should warn companies against entering such agreements, under threat of shareholder lawsuit for misuse of corporate funds, when it turns out there was nothing really there.

Turning downsiting Microsoft into a global business

Posted May 15, 2007 22:37 UTC (Tue) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link]

What needs to happen, and may happen as I've already heard about law firms looking for prospective clients, is turning downsizing Microsoft into a high risk, high profit global business for enterprising local software companies & legal firms, and potent investors.

Now that Microsoft has successfully stripped itself of allies, and revealed itself as a national security threat for many governments globally, never mind threatening to sue their core customers, I assume a lot of people in high places globally won't mind seeing that threat reduced significantly, and would invest resources in one way or another.

Add in a business model based extracting some of the huge pile of cash Microsoft sits on (60 billion dollars, I believe), and you have a way of fixing the Microsoft issue, and presumably fixing the US patent system, once the world is finished downsizing them. It should be pretty good business, as these days a single patent that gets through Microsoft's defenses can fetch more than a billion dollars for a significantly smaller investment.

It won't be pretty, for Microsoft, and I'm afraid they've just crossed the point of no return, where the self-interest of everyone else in the world is in diminishing the threat that they pose, while trying to be the first ones to get whatever tasty bit is left of the beached whale.

Think SCO, only on a global scale, and a lot faster.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 17, 2007 14:13 UTC (Thu) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

"Microsoft currently collects royalties from some companies that use Linux in their computing environments, Gutierrez said."

D.Faranzano Gutierrez : You gotta pay, everebody knows they gotta pay... to benefice from our protection, you know !?... accidents do happen, "capice" ?

Tux : 3 finger salute... 'BS'... dont dance at the music of some pretentious ?8%(/&% hot shot...

**Isnt this a recurrent theme, or what ? **

Some good advice to D. Gutierrez 'pezzonovante' would be: go get a live... do something positive for the humankind for a change... you and your higher dons... for crying out loud !

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 15, 2007 18:56 UTC (Tue) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah and I want to see an injunction to prevent the sale of Vista for violating patents belonging to IBM and Sun. Swords are usually double edged.

They've agreed not to

Posted May 15, 2007 19:43 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

All the big patent holders have cross licensing agreements to protect each from each other in this way. The oligopoly don't want to take pot shots at their peers, they are focussing on keeping the general public out of the software development process.

Novell-Microsoft deal

Posted May 15, 2007 19:19 UTC (Tue) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link]

"a bridge between two worlds"??

Hmmm... it looked to me more like a combination of extortion (by MS) and selling out (by Novell).

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 15, 2007 19:24 UTC (Tue) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

> Microsoft doesn't want litigation

Of course not - if it ever went to court their case would fall apart...

Much better for ms to stay well away from the courtroom, and try to maintain the current atmosphere of FUD through vague innuendo, weasel words, and dirty deals with those who will play along.

Foot In Mouth

Posted May 15, 2007 22:38 UTC (Tue) by tavis (guest, #14187) [Link]

The trouble for Microsoft is that now that Guiterrez has indicated that they have a list of 235 patents, patent law requires them to make infringers aware of patent violations or those infringers have limited liablility. Before, Ballmer used to make vague stammering statements to the effect of "we know they violate some of our patents" -- I assume this was under legal advice, because as long as you plead ignorance about which patents are being violated by what, you can still claim later when you sue someone that you had a good reason not to inform the violator of the violation (i.e., you didn't know).

Now that M$ has admitted they know what violations are there, they have to inform the patent violators or they will not have given the violators a chance to correct their behavior -- which is looked upon very badly by courts.

a possible bridge

Posted May 15, 2007 23:15 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Microsoft and OIN could agree to cross-license patents. Microsoft can then use any of the OIN patents in its proprietary products, in exchange for GPL software as well as the OIN members getting the right to use any of the relevant Microsoft patents. However, the GPL (2 or 3draft) requires that any license grants extend to anyone who wants to redistribute or modify the code.

This would lift a threat hanging off of Microsoft's head; as a company that has mainly copied others' ideas, it's vulnerable to patent suits and is a much more attractive target than Linux developers are, since it has much more money.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 15, 2007 23:35 UTC (Tue) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (6 responses)

People are failing to remember that Microsoft has already tried to litigate Linux out of existence via the Baystar/SCO debacle. It's only when that legal charade became obviously futile that they began to attempt the "velvet glove" strategy via Novell. This latest news is just an extension of that.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2007 5:42 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

I don't think so.

SCO got completely screwed over by IBM for something only tangentially related to Linux.

SCO, IBM, and some other players (Intel, Sequent, etc) got together and decided that Unix was to fractured. So their solution was to standardize Unix around two operating systems.. AIX for high-end POWER systems and SCO's Unix for x86 stuff. They would take huge pains to make sure that applications were going to be completely portable between both systems.

This was called 'Project Montery', and it was started in 1998.

As you can imagine this took significant resources out of SCO. As a result they never had a chance to modernize their Unix variant until many many years later.

Meanwhile you have project Trillian in 1999. Which was a effort to port Linux to the IA-64 platform and make it suitable for more higher end stuff. Trillian delivered working code in 2001 and is what lead to the 2.6 kernel. With 2.4 kernel you could maybe scale to 8 proccessors, and get some performance improvement. Anything beyond that and you'd loose performance. With 2.6 they eliminated the major bottlenecks and now Linux scales easily to 256 or so proccessors and then to thousands of proccessors with relatively minor effort.

Needless to say with Linux around Montery was pointless. IBM abandoned it after selling only 32 licenses.

IBM would have to pay royalties to SCO for Montery. IBM doesn't have to pay royalties for Linux.

From SCO's perspective IBM basicly anniliated them. So this stuff was a pitifull attempt to try to get IBM back and maybe get them to start paying royalties or at least get some money or be bought out so they can retire rich.

Eventually it morphed into Linux-Unix 'IP' issues when SCO figured it didn't have a leg to stand on. It was a bit of a fishing trip.

I think that Microsoft through some money at SCO simply for the amusement of it. Maybe make Unix/Linux look all litigious and stupid and make it easier for them to convince users to stay with Windows.

But I don't think it was a serious attempt to 'kill linux' or anything like that.

Neither is this. It's just Microsoft trying to create the illusion that Linux isn't Free.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2007 5:59 UTC (Wed) by Brotherred (guest, #45141) [Link] (1 responses)

Well I am not upset like I normally am over stuff like this. Clear at least to me is the SCO deal has taught me some thing. I'll just be blunt. I actually would like to see a patent war between IBM the biggest patent holder in the world teamed up with all of the other FOSS companies (Minus Novel?) against Microsoft.

SCO episode III. I keep saying it and I just can't wait to see it.

Yes, but...

Posted May 16, 2007 7:52 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

Looking at this scenario from an overall bigger perspective, a patent war fought in the courtroom would spell disaster for all the participants. It would drain considerable resources from all parties, leaving companies little (if any) to pursue research & development and marketing new products. Computer-using consumers would be the losers.

I do feel that Microsoft created an ugly situation by making the patent violation claim the other day, and they only exacerbated the whole thing by "promising" not to sue various Linux-using companies (to assuage various fears that they actually could sue).

If Microsoft wants to strike licensing deals (as the InformationWeek article mentions), then how come they didn't do so years ago? Some of these "infringed" patents must certainly date back to at least 1998 or so. I know that question borders on rhetorical, but how come just now Microsoft wants to cry foul? Seems to me they're a day late and a dollar short.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2007 8:33 UTC (Wed) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]

Hmm, but why would Caldera feel any resentment over what happened to SCO?
Remember, the company called "The SCO Group" today is not the company
called SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) that was involved in Project Monterey.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2007 13:51 UTC (Wed) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]

With 2.4 kernel you could maybe scale to 8 proccessors, and get some performance improvement. Anything beyond that and you'd loose performance.

Ugh, that statement is quite wrong and i've got to correct it. Linux 2.0 (the first SMP capable Linux kernel, released 11 years ago in 1996) was successfully booted on a 36-CPU system back then. Scalability sucked but it got improved gradually in 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6.

With Linux 2.4 you could scale to well over 8 processors with user-space load - and with specific areas of bottlenecks for kernel-bound workloads. Note that most stuff users run is _user-space code_. So the 2.4 Linux kernel, for all practical purposes, was quite useful up to 64 CPUs or so. If you threw kernel-intense benchmarks at it you'd see bottlenecks, but if you used it to do things like calculations then it would scale quite linearly.

And also note that what matters is the hardware that is commonly available. Linux gradually evolved its SMP code in the x86 space, and as x86 grew larger and larger, so did Linux follow it. The largest Linux systems right now run 4096 CPUs (in the same system image - i.e. not clusters), and such systems simply were not mainstream-available 5 or 10 years ago.

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Posted May 16, 2007 14:50 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

You're confusing SCO-Santa Cruz with SCO-Caldera. Easily done, that's one reason that the McBride Caldera changed their name to SCO ("The SCO Group") after purchasing Santa Cruz's Unix business (and the Santa Cruz Operation renamed themselves to Tarantella).

The current SCO (SCOG nee Caldera) had NOTHING to do with the Monterey project, they are merely a successor-in-interest to that part of Santa Cruz's Unix business that they bought. To that degree, it was "damaged goods" when they bought it and Caldera knew or should have known that. They've got no legitimate beef with IBM over that.