I really should be craming for an exam, but this is more fun.
Over the past few days there has been a huge amount of hoohah over Microsofts Claim that thereare 235 patents that have been violated in OpenSource products.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted a lenghly reply that attack the root of Microsofts way of doing business:
With business down and customers leaving, we had more than a few choices at our disposal. We were invited by one company to sue the beneficiaries of open source. We declined. We could join another and sue our customers. That seemed suicidal. We were offered the choice to scuttle Solaris, and resell someone else’s operating system. We declined. And we were encouraged to innovate by developers and customers who wanted Sun around, who saw the value we delivered through true systems engineering.
So we took that advice. We started by securing the software assets we were building – so that we could convey them under trusted open source licenses to a community we’d just started nurturing. We redoubled our focus on innovation, in hardware and software, that would differentiate our offerings. Not just as good as the competition, but vastly better. We supported Linux on our SPARC systems, and forced ourselves to open up every business we operate – Solaris wasn’t the hammer for all nails. Nor was SPARC. Nor Java.
In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.
If that didn’t sting enough, Tim O’Reilly compared Microsofts claim to the one McCarthy made about here being 206 commmunists in the state department:
Does Microsoft’s claim that Free and Open Source Software infringes on 235 Microsoft patents remind anyone of Joseph McCarthy’s famous claim about communists at the State Department? Whether or not it’s true, citing such a number without providing any detail is such a classic FUD move that, to me at least, it just makes Microsoft look ridiculous. More recently, it’s reminiscent of the bluster of the SCO case against IBM.
The question I keep asking myself is: If it comes to it, who is Microsoft going to sue? Open Source Software by its very nature involves a cast of thousands. The second issue involves the way that Microsoft is going to prove it. The only way it can do that is to show that its own propiotory code is exactly the same as the code in said Open Source Software. Which negates the whole idea of keeping your code under wraps.
Perhaps, and this is a long shot, Microsoft should follow Sun and reap the benifits:
In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.
Net result? Our contributions, from Java to OpenOffice to Gnome and Mozilla, now account for in excess of 25% of all lines of code within your average Linux distribution (yup, read that sentence again – or see the report, here, page 51). We joined forces with the likes of Google and IBM and Red Hat to drive the Open Document Format, accelerating document interchange. ODF is now accelerating globally, as the standard trusted by governments and academic institutions for multi-generational document interchange. It is an unstoppable force, no threat can kill a country’s drive for independence or self-sufficiency (remember, the network’s a social utility, too).
Random Musings 