Title: Microsoft says Linux, Open Office step on patents
Orginal link: http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/214113
Author: Jessica Mintz - associated press
Published date: May 15, 2007 03:37 PM

SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. cranked up the rhetoric against open-source software with new details about the ways it says free programs violate its patents.

While the world's largest software company said it prefers licensing deals to legal action, it also indicated it won't ignore what it sees as infringement.

"There is no reason why any segment of the industry needs to be exempt from intellectual property rules," said Horacio Gutierrez, a Microsoft vice-president for intellectual property and licensing.

At the most basic level, open-source software is built by a community of companies and independent programmers. It's distributed, often without charge, to businesses and consumers and programmers to modify, build on, and distribute again – also for free.

While proprietary software companies like Microsoft make money by selling licences for programs, open-source companies usually make money selling support services.

On Monday, Microsoft said open-source programs step on 235 Microsoft patents. The core of the free Linux operating system violates 42 patents. Open-source programs' graphical user interfaces, or the way menus and windows look on the screen, breach 65. E-mail programs step on 15, and other programs violate 68 patents, the company said. The patent figures were first reported by Fortune magazine.

Microsoft also said Open Office, an open-source program supported in part by Sun Microsystems Inc., infringes on 45 patents. Sun declined to comment on the allegation.

Microsoft's Windows is the dominant software on servers and desktop PCs, but Microsoft views the free or low-cost Linux operating system alternatives "with a great deal of concern," said Al Gillen, an analyst at the technology research group IDC.

"It's one of the few operating systems that represents a viable threat that Microsoft has a great deal of difficulty containing," Gillen said. Because open-source developers share their code, the challenge to Microsoft's products isn't limited to one company.

Instead, Microsoft has struck a number of patent-licensing deals with companies that use open source code, most notably Novell Inc. last November. In one aspect of the deal, Microsoft agreed to sell Novell's flavour of Linux, called Suse. It also agreed not to sue the customers who bought it, even though it claims the open-source software infringes on its patents.

"Microsoft could have chosen to litigate many years ago, but we have decided not to do that," Gutierrez said. Instead, in the interest of making sure programs that include open-source technology work with Microsoft products and vice versa, the company will continue to pursue similar deals.

Much of the open-source community was unhappy with the Novell deal, which it saw as a workaround to a widely used open-source licence called the GNU General Public Licence.

More broadly, the free software movement saw the deal as an attack on one of its core tenets. Under the public licence, once open-source code is incorporated into another company's technology, the new product must also be freely available. But the deal also required Novell to pay millions in "royalties" – an indirect admission that Suse Linux contained Microsoft intellectual property and can't be given away for free.

"Now it becomes possible to divide and conquer our community," said Eben Moglen, a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, the entity behind the GNU licence. By making a pact with Novell, Microsoft also implied that anyone who downloaded or bought Linux from another vendor was doing so illegally.

The next version of the GNU licence, currently in draft form, aims to stop similar deals. Moglen said the draft states that if a company like Microsoft distributes open-source programs protected by the GNU licence, it forfeits any related patent claims.

Open-source proponents are frustrated by Microsoft's repeated allusions to patent violations because "they never say what patents being violated, never make any assertions, never put the evidence out there," said Larry Augustin, a technology startup investor who launched SourceForge.net, a prominent open-source development site, in 1999.

But Augustin also acknowledged that it's not in Microsoft's interest to do so: Open-source programmers could rewrite their code to avoid infringing on specific patents, or the courts could find that Microsoft's patent isn't valid.

An ongoing open-source patent case could indicate that it isn't easy for a software maker to prove infringement. The SCO Group Inc., a Utah-based company, sued IBM Corp. in 2003 for donating its proprietary Unix code to open-source developers. Late last year, a U.S. judge upheld a decision to dismiss about half of the claims against IBM, agreeing that SCO had failed to identify exactly which lines of code in Linux infringed on its patents.

Legal action by Microsoft could also kick off a massive patent war. An organization called the Open Innovation Network, funded by IBM, Red Hat Inc. and others, has amassed a vast number of software patents. If there is a Microsoft lawsuit against open source companies or customers, the OIN would retaliate in kind.

"We believe it's highly likely that Microsoft would infringe some of our patents," said Jerry Rosenthal, OIN's chief executive.

So, Microsoft "con'd" Novell into paying royalties for Patent violations in its Suse Linux.

Microsoft now things that downloading and using linux, or any other large number of Open Source software is illegal.

Have to laugh at that one, mainly because most people go out of there way to pirate M$ products.. now they don't have to, they can just download linux..

Way to fuel the Open Source Initiative M$

But i do feel sorry for the Open Source community in the event that Microsoft sues. The GNU community have a license agreement, that is 100% legal, and Microsoft are doing everything in their power to under-mine it, its highly unfair that Microsoft gets to browse through the source code to Linux, and find so called "infringed patents" BUT, seeing as what the core of an OS does is a set thing its highly likely that using the same programming language a lot of the code is going to look very similar.

It also sucks that Microsoft is not willing to release details on what parts of the code are infringed upon, Most likely because then people will have a direct look at probably all of 1 line of code from the OS.

They should release exactly what is wrong and let the GNU community fix it !!

Exactly, the whole idea of Infringment Notification is so the offending party can identify the violation and take steps to remove or legalise the infringing section.
It would be embarassing for M$ if their code was as available as the open-source community - people would be able to find and identify the defficiencies and bloated parts of their product - can't have "amateurs"* pointing out the holes in their code.
I believe that M$ is taking their reverse-engineering concerns too far - it happens all the time, hell, most of the current engineering we take for granted is based on data collected from reverse-engineered equipement confiscated off the Germans after WW2


* - as defined by "A Professional"=Someone who is paid for their work

***Addition***
I received this in one of the tech newsletters I actuall read, more M$ sillyness.
Ribbons, licenses and Microsoft
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/feature.aspx?CIaFID=3498
In a nut shell, M$ is trying to patent the IP behind the "ribbon bar" it uses in Office '07, and has stipulated 150 pages of regulations and such that must be rigidly adhered to if you wish to use the "ribbon bar" or a make a 3rd party look alike; certain behaviour must incorporated into the bar, menu components must be laid out in a certain manner AND order, yada yada yada, and the clincher - any extension/improved functionality, even if it makes the "ribbon bar" more useful/better, is a major violation of the license worthy of legal attention and thus not allowed!
M$'s getting too big for its boots methinks.