NEWS
Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open source vendors they must respect his company's intellectual property.
In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open source world".
The cross-selling partnership means Microsoft will recommend Suse Linux for customers who want a mixed Microsoft/open source environment. It also involves a "patent co-operation agreement", under which Microsoft and Novell agreed not to sue each other's customers for patent infringement.
In a clear threat against open source users, Ballmer repeated his earlier assertions that open source "is not free", referring to the possibility that Microsoft may sue Linux vendors. Microsoft has suggested Linux software infringes some of its intellectual property but has never named the patents in question.
Ballmer said: "I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free, and open source will have to respect the intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will."
He added: "But I don't want to eliminate in your minds the notions of risk of pricing that comes from competition with open source. We are higher priced but we bring greater value."
Alongside the renewed threat over IP, Ballmer was also bullish about winning large corporate accounts against Linux vendors. "We have done very well versus Linux on the desktop and on the server, and I am hopeful that we will build share, particularly in web servers and high-performance clusters, from Linux in the next year," he told analysts.
But Red Hat's chief executive is not impressed. Addressing a Merrill Lynch conference at the start of this week, Matthew Szulik urged his customers to use up their open source tokens from the Microsoft/Novell partnership. These coupons entitle them to support and maintenance for Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.
Szulik said: "We certainly expect that there will be those cases where customers will consume those coupons. We're certainly encouraging one or two customers to consume all of them: let's get this over with."
As of January, Microsoft had already sold 35,000 open source coupons out of the 70,000 it has committed to make available each year as part of the five year-partnership.
AIG Technologies, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are among those to take advantage of the Microsoft/Novell collaboration to roll out a mixed proprietary/open source infrastructure.
Richard Thurston writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. anonymous
Quote: "Microsoft has suggested Linux software infringes some of its intellectual property but has never named the patents in question."
That's a pretty bold non-committal statement, and one I would love to see them back up, and win in court.
Quote:"We are higher priced but we bring greater value."
Not really, It is generally accepted they ARE higher priced, but, insofar as bring greater value, not so much.
Unless your talking of the value they bring to their shareholders.
Windows is an unstable constantly changing OS which has morphed over the years into an overpriced under achieving bloated top heavy OS.
It's office suite of tools is good but not the best. I own a copy of WinXP and only use it to communicate with "other windows based companies", otherwise I live and breathe LINUX.
I challenge you to give me an example of something you claim can only be done in Windows, and not Linux...
You would loose the challenge.
I'm not saying a company should not make a profit, but quite the contrary, you need to make a profit, and it is achieved faster by making better, more reliable products and if you can do that with less R&D costs then all the better.
If you can do this while embracing the world with an open mind and a concept of idea sharing, then you will be much more widely accepted and successful, without the backlash from the oppressed.
If Microsoft continues to concentrate on litigation and proprietary OS protocols and not focus on actually improving their OS performance and reliability, then they will continue to face the "bad press" and wrath of the open source and world community.
I work for a large hi-tech company, all our R&D hardware and software tools are migrating to Linux, away from Solaris and Windows. Our office applications continue to be Windows based. I would guess by the end of this decade 2/3rds of our desktop, workstation and data center machines will be Linux based. I'm talking in excess of 60,000 machines.
In this changing world, a world with a global economy, a world without borders.... we are stuck, held prisoners, behind big Gates.
2. anonymous
Ballmer's comments are more show than substance. I believe, unless I am mistaken, that SUSE is using the same kernal as other Linux distributions. IBM assisted in a complete overhaual of the kernal and filed many patents with the patent office. Microsoft versus IBM would be a joke. IBM has more patents than everyone else combined and they only enforce a subset of them.
3. Simon
The threat of court action over alleged patent infrignement is something that everyone should take seriously. While it's nice to think that there is no infringing code, I wouldn't bet on it given the number of patents Microsoft file every year (and the lack of quality of some patents granted). I think we can be fairly safe in the assumption that Microsoft has quite a few patents on some obvious techniques that are used in Linux - these might be 'obvious' or have 'prior art', but it will cost a LOT of money to defend the action while waiting for the patent to be re-examined.
If Microsoft do sue then they will choose their target carefully - and it won't be pretty. Even if they have no case whatsoever, defending the action will cost money - serious money that few open source developers have. Assuming you get the case thrown out at teh first hearing, you can expect Microsoft to appeal, and appeal again - all the way up the court system.
It's a simple technique widely abused by large cash rich companies like Microsoft - just keep the pressure on, appeal everything, and wait till the other side runs out of money. They done it before when they've been found guilty of stealing other peoples IP, and I dare say we'll see them do it again.
You only have to look at the SCO fiasco to see how much damage, how much cost, and how much inconvenience, a company can cause by sueing people with no grounds. The difference is that with Microsoft it won't be a case of waiting until they run out of cash !
4. x
quote: "I challenge you to give me an example of something you claim can only be done in Windows, and not Linux...
You would loose the challenge."
Although I use Linux too and love it, that statement obviously says you don't have much idea about the commercial use of Windows in large industrial applications.
For example, assuming you had an EPROM programmer (a real commercially manufactured one, not some cheap home-made backyard job), try getting that to work under Linux NATIVELY (i.e. WITHOUT using Wine etc.)
You WILL loose that challenge.
Want more examples?
Read this......
http://www.mameworld.net/gurudumps/guruvslinux.html