Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 13th May 2007 22:24 UTC, submitted by Havin_it
"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."
Permalink for comment 240004
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2006-07-04
"Microsoft violates all sorts of patents held by Sun, IBM, and many others. Some of those companies earn money on or through Linux. They would potentially fight back by launching a salvo of infringement suites of their own. "
The big companies generally have deals allowing for cross-licensing of patents. Even the article says, "So Microsoft took the third choice, which was to begin licensing its patents to other companies in exchange for either royalties or access to their patents (a "cross-licensing" deal). In December 2003, Microsoft's new licensing unit opened for business, and soon the company had signed cross-licensing pacts with such tech firms as Sun, Toshiba, SAP and Siemens."
The problem, from Microsoft's perspective, is that there's no one enity to deal with in the FOSS community, so how do you make cross-licensing or royalty deals? Microsoft feels that the FOSS community feels free to violate any patent it likes because there's noone to make deals with or even to sue. And, indeed, I've seen OSS advocates on slashdot cite this as a virtue of FOSS - "We don't worry about violating patents because we're too spread out and not individually rich enough to be sued."
A concrete example is MPEG2. There are plenty of OSS MPEG2 players that don't pay the MPEG2 license fee (which as around $10 per player). Microsoft, except for Windows MCE and now Vista, didn't ship an MPEG2 codec with WMP because they didn't want to pay for the license. Instead, they direct the user to pay $10 for an MPEG2 codec from a third party (like CyberLink), or let the OEM pay for the codec. Apple charges the user $10 for an MPEG2 codec for their QuickTime player for the same reason. But OSS devs make video players with MPEG2 support, without bothering with the license at all. And they feel secure in doing so because it's not worth the effort to sue them.