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The only thing you hurt when one refuses to 'play ball' with the establishment is yourself. There are patents on technology; some of them legitimate, others just owned by patent trolling companies. Until Linux vendors work as official software companies and work with other vendors to sort this issue out - it helps no one doing what Red Hat is doing, namely, sitting on the side lines spitting and cursing at Microsoft/Novell.

Microsoft technology is here to stay whether Red Hat and the open source devotee's on this website like it or not.If you want to compete with Microsoft - create a better and superior widget. When Microsoft create a product, stop spitting and cursing at the customers who purchase it or Microsoft - get a copy of the product yourself and analyse it. Find out why customers want it, and create a better version of it.

Take Microsoft Office/Sharepoint integration, why don't we see an OpenOffice.org version of that? why don't we see an end to end solution in the opensource world to the Office System? too much time spitting at Microsoft than doing something productive? too much complaining about patents than listening and addressing what customers needs are?

Edited 2008-09-20 11:03 UTC

Real interoperability has nothing to do with shady patent deals. Standards should be available in a open royalty free manner.

Red Hat recently did something that promotes that

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/04/red_hat_buys_qumranet/print...

In among all these press releases is the loss of real worth. Where is the source code and patches?

Microsoft makes working with sharepoint a big pain for anybody else other than Windows however it can be done. A few alternatives are

http://marketing20.blogspot.com/2006/11/o3spaces-open-source-sharep...

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/07/alfresco_...

The notion that only way to interoperate is to suck up to patent deals and screw upstream projects is despicable.

Edited 2008-09-20 13:04 UTC

Replace Sharepoint on the server with Alfresco.

In fact, replace the whole server with a Linux server, and then put Alfresco and OpenXchange on that.

There is your no-lockout end-to-end collaboration and e-mail system.

Much cheaper too!

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/red-hat-alfresco-sharepoin...

http://weblog.infoworld.com/stratdev/archives/2008/07/open_source_e...

http://www.open-xchange.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

I'm sure there are a number of other open source solutions ... but the essential smart move is to get rid of sharepoint itself.

You are saying that in order to be part of the solution one must become part of the problem. That makes no sense. Thanks Lord Vader, but no thanks.

The same was probably once said about the Roman empire.

The biggest reason, and the primary reason people get so worked up about it, is because microsoft traditionally haven't published the specs of their formats or the interfaces used by such programs to integrate...

Which means that those trying to create competing software have to expend significant effort reverse engineering microsoft code first... And it's also often necessary to recreate the whole stack rather than creating individual components that can interoperate with the microsoft components.

OpenOffice developers are spending far too much time trying to reverse engineer microsoft's binary formats, and trying to implement their poorly documented OOXML format, and reverse engineering the undocumented ooxml-based format msoffice 2007 uses, to work on new features...

I, too, have a real concern when I read this argument over and over. It goes like this:

Something must be really, really wrong with you people in that reading these comments gives me the fishy feeling you are blind to the fact that MS is only one of a million possible patent litigants - and in that, the so called patent deal buys you exactly nada. Well great, MS doesn't sue the Novell end-user but a millions others may and probably will (SCO anyone?). You totally over-rate the whole thing in that light.

No-one but Microsoft can sue "Linux", or any Linux distribution, or any Linux end users, over patents that Microsoft holds.

Hence, when the topic is Linux interoperability with Microsoft lock-in protocols, only Microsoft can attempt to sue over any alleged patent violation in that arena.

As soon as Microsoft try to sue Linux, then the Linux Foundation and the SFLC would counter-sue Microsoft:

http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/patents.php

http://www.patentcommons.org/

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Protect

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/

If Microsoft tried an injunction to get people to stop using Linux, the the Linux legal defence would obtain an injunction to get people to stop using Microsoft Windows.

Imagine that for just one minute ... an injunction to legally prevent everyone in the US to stop running Windows.

Microsoft won't sue Linux over patent violation.

If Microsoft did sue, and the mutually-assured-destruction scenario did eventuate ... the government would have to step in and arbitrate. You just can't run a country like that, held to ransom by one monopoly supplier. That just isn't going to fly.

Edited 2008-09-21 00:56 UTC

MS are one of the least likely companies to sue directly using their patents... They have far too much to lose, no doubt their products infringe upon patents held by the likes of IBM or Sun, and the resulting countersuit would be very painful.

You have more to fear from small companies with nothing to lose. Not that MS wouldn't pay such companies to try anyway.