Microsoft – Using Patents As Weapons, According to Torvalds

We all know Microsoft, despite the excellent philanthropic initiatives of its founder, Bill Gates, is a very tough player on the IT market, and sometimes they go a bit over the red line. One of the facts that prove this is the way they choose to defend intellectual property, sometimes "defending" more than just their own court. If this would have been soccer, it would have been called "pressing game", and no referee could do something about it, but we're not playing here... and Linus Torvalds thinks Microsoft way of handling things goes too far, without any practical reason.

Now, why would care Linus Torvalds about Microsoft's intellectual property lawsuits? Well, it seems they went so far to claim the Linux violates some of their patents. Since that story is not really fresh, being almost one year old, let me refresh your memory... Back in May 2007, Microsoft didn't say free software, including Linux, violates 2 or 3, maybe 5-6 of its patents. They claimed free software is so good and popular because it violates over 200 Microsoft patents! Well, if those 200 are only a part of their patents, shouldn't Microsoft's products be better? Just asking, don't mind to answer to that...

"They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don't think they've -- not that I've gone through any huge amount of law cases -- but I don't think they've generally used patents as a weapon[..] But they're perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, 'Hey, isn't this convenient? We can use this as a PR force.'", said Torvalds about Microsoft's policy.

Now, I'll leave Mr. Torvalds aside, and try to think about something - if Bill Gates is so much into helping others, why doesn't he say "stop" to those in charge of throwing with patent infringements here and there? In the end, it seems their involvement in the Linux world, together with Novell, wasn't so full of good intentions as some would have thought, maybe...

At last, let's get back to Torvalds, and quote him one last time: "I work weekdays, I work weekends, I work 52 weeks a year. I don't want there to be any question of who's the best maintainer. And at the same time, I actually also do want to encourage competition. ... So, I actually enjoy seeing all these other kernel trees happening. All the vendors have their own."

Hear that? While some acquire patents and use them as weapons, others really work on improving the OS landscape. To be honest, I don't have anything against Microsoft, as long as they don't have anything against the rest of the world, but it's really a shame to find out that their only comments included the part "we believe that Linux infringes on our intellectual property"...