Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 17th Nov 2006 13:23 UTC, submitted by Tanked
In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property. In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."
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Member since:
2005-11-11
//Don't patents apply whether you reverse engineer it or not, depending on what the patent owner says?//
Yes they do.
The MS "IP" in question is not, however, patented. They are trade secrets.
In order to have a valid patent, MS must fully publish exactly how the format or protocol works. If they do that, they can get patent protection for 20 years on that exact method.
Microsoft have not published anywhere exactly how their NTFS filesystem works. It is a trade secret.
Therefore, MS have no patent on NTFS.
Similar story for the networking protocol that Samba reverse-engineers.