Microsoft Uses Patents Against Open Source
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on May 15, 2007 at 2:14:34 PM
It seems that Microsoft will try to extort money (or FUD, at least) from Open Source companies and such by saying that many projects infringe on its patents. The funny thing is that Microsoft will not release which patents are being infringed on... This leads to a baseless argument since the Open Source community cannot defend itself.
Quote
When Novell and Microsoft announced their patent deal, the Free Software Foundation was quick to say it would move to prohibit such arrangements in a future version of the General Public License (GPL), the most widely used open-source license. The most recent draft seeks to prohibit all future deals of that nature and potentially past ones, too. The timing of Microsoft's pronouncement is telling, Radcliffe said, "particularly when you think that GPL version 3 is still in draft. I don't think that is a coincidence," he said.