The issue may not be as cut and dried as
I had thought. I still maintain it's a dumb thing for them to do... but then, companies feeling threatened and without other real revenue streams can do some pretty dumb things (witness the RIAA). I don't think that Microsoft should be feeling all that threatened and they are certainly working hard on other revenue streams, but according to Mary Jo
there is some interesting logic now explaining why Microsoft might feel the need to start pulling out the legal big guns.
Interestingly enough, if they are feeling threatened, it's because they walked into a trap of their own making with the Novell deal. The next version of the
Gnu General Public License (the thing that makes most Open Source software open, including Linux) has provisions in it which have the potential to subject Microsoft to its terms, due to their arrangement with Novell. For various reasons, that's not something they can stomach--and so it may well provide that extra impetus for legal action.
So I suppose it's possible, although I still consider it unlikely. A lot of things can happen in court, and for all Microsoft's legal expertise, those things would be very much outside their control. As
Fortune's article on the matter points out, it's equally possible (perhaps even more likely) that Microsoft's own code infringes on other patented IP... more likely, of course, exactly because Open Source is open: any lazy Microsoft developer could easily have appropriated freely available open source code and included it in Microsoft's code base; it's more difficult to understand how open source developers might have acquired Microsoft's closed and closely guarded code to put it in their own programs. Of course, patents cover concepts not literal implementations, so the presumption at this point is that the infringement is unwitting--few guys hacking out code in a basement have the resources or the inclination to perform a patent search to see if the basic idea they are pursuing has been patented.
And it seems likely that this is the case--but if Microsoft forces the issue, they could be hurting themselves as much as anyone. There are a limited number of ways to accomplish anything in software, and if anything Microsoft is likely to simply prove the point that software should not be patentable, or at least not in as broad a terms as it has been in recent history. Indeed, it's likely that many of the patents may be found invalid, obviated by prior art--that some guy in a basement was doing it before Microsoft filed the papers on it.
For these and other reasons, many observers are crying
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt--which was my original take on the whole matter) but personally I am beginning to wonder. Still, if anything happens, I believe Microsoft will have their market as upset by it as the open-source market, so if there is upheaval to be had, it will probably be across the board. The good news is that I don't think this will have much direct effect on the SMB market segment--Microsoft wants to prove a point, and if they do anything it's going to be against larger fish.
The GPL version 3 is due out in July. The Fourth may not provide the only fireworks this year.
indigoMOONsystems
