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."
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Member since:2006-06-21
Ah, but it gets really hairy where GPL is involved. Even v2 has an implied patent license:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070328071651351
No, pursuing this would only open a huge can of worms. I cannot believe they'd be so stupid.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Microsoft also has cross-licensing patent agreements with many of those companies, including Sun I believe. So I don't think they could or would sue Microsoft.