Microsoft turns into a "big SCO"
The notorious speech of Steve Ballmer was held last week at a meeting with financial analysts in New York. The Microsoft executive said that the November 2006 agreement with Novell "clearly demonstrated the value of intellectual property, even in the open source world."
The five-year agreement between Novell and Microsoft implies mutually beneficial cross-platform sales, that is, Microsoft recommends the Suse Linux distribution to its customers who use Microsoft’s mixed platforms and open source. Microsoft annually allocates 70,000 coupons for service support for Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The campaign became quite popular and by January 35,000 coupons had been redeemed. Among the largest customers are Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies.
An important part of the agreement is a patent cooperation agreement . It turned out that Novell paid Microsoft $ 40 million in exchange for a guarantee of immunity for Suse Linux users, who may violate Microsoft patents. Steve Ballmer said then: “Users who use Suse paid for intellectual property owned by Microsoft. We also want to make deals with Red Hat and other Linux distributors. ”
The agreement with MS was ambiguously perceived by the open source community and the employees of Novell themselves. The company even left a leading programmer in protest.
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Now Steve Ballmer again repeated the threats against the biggest Linux developers. According to him, Microsoft can sue them for patent infringement. He said that the company does not expect to earn a lot of money on license fees, but simply wants to make "educational work" so that competitors respect patent law.
Despite repeated repetition of threats, however, Steve Ballmer again did not specify which Microsoft patents were allegedly infringed by Linux developers. It should be borne in mind that the usual US patents for software are not valid in most countries of the world where software is not patented in principle.
According to reputable experts, the activities of the notorious SCO company were funded by Microsoft . Since SCO has now discredited itself, Microsoft’s patent activity looks like a continuation of the previous policy on legal pressure on open source developers.
The five-year agreement between Novell and Microsoft implies mutually beneficial cross-platform sales, that is, Microsoft recommends the Suse Linux distribution to its customers who use Microsoft’s mixed platforms and open source. Microsoft annually allocates 70,000 coupons for service support for Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The campaign became quite popular and by January 35,000 coupons had been redeemed. Among the largest customers are Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies.
An important part of the agreement is a patent cooperation agreement . It turned out that Novell paid Microsoft $ 40 million in exchange for a guarantee of immunity for Suse Linux users, who may violate Microsoft patents. Steve Ballmer said then: “Users who use Suse paid for intellectual property owned by Microsoft. We also want to make deals with Red Hat and other Linux distributors. ”
The agreement with MS was ambiguously perceived by the open source community and the employees of Novell themselves. The company even left a leading programmer in protest.
')
Now Steve Ballmer again repeated the threats against the biggest Linux developers. According to him, Microsoft can sue them for patent infringement. He said that the company does not expect to earn a lot of money on license fees, but simply wants to make "educational work" so that competitors respect patent law.
Despite repeated repetition of threats, however, Steve Ballmer again did not specify which Microsoft patents were allegedly infringed by Linux developers. It should be borne in mind that the usual US patents for software are not valid in most countries of the world where software is not patented in principle.
According to reputable experts, the activities of the notorious SCO company were funded by Microsoft . Since SCO has now discredited itself, Microsoft’s patent activity looks like a continuation of the previous policy on legal pressure on open source developers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/5066/
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