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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2007-02-17
{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).}
The problem here is that MP3 is not a Microsoft patent. Most Linux distributions, and indeed most Linux media players, do not ship with MP3 codecs.
If Microsoft does in fact hold a valid patent (for example, in a media codec such as WMV or WMA), for which there is no prior art (no prior art for a media codec? how are they going to argue that one?), and which patent is indeed implemented in Linux, then exactly how are Microsoft going to argue any damages? Microsoft don't offer a WMA or WMV codec for Linux, so Microsoft's sales of that patent are not harmed by a codec for Linux.
Microsoft don't offer anything for Linux. Microsoft are therefore not harmed if someone else makes a product for Linux.
Patents are, after all, meant to protect inventions, so that the inventor may offer it for sale. If Microsoft are not offering their stuff for sale in a given market, then they are not harmed by another party who does.