Microsoft owns patents on intellectual property included in Linux.

Steve Ballmer said that Microsoft signed an agreement with Novell, a distributor of SUSE Linux, because Linux uses their intellectual property, and Microsoft just wanted an economic return for its shareholders.

It turns out that a key element of the deal was that Novell paid Microsoft $ 40 million in exchange for a promise to sue SUSE Linux users for possible patent infringements. Also, protection was received by developers who program for SUSE Linux under the Open Source license, and developers who program for it for money.

At first, Microsoft officials were silent about disrupting the Linux kernel, protected by the GPL license, Microsoft patents or not. But on Tuesday, Steve Ballmer said: “Novell pays us money and gets the right to guarantee consumers that everyone who uses SUSE Linux is clean before the law. This is important to us, because otherwise we could assume that everyone who uses Linux violates the law. ”“ Only users who use SUSE paid for intellectual property owned by Microsoft. We also want to make deals with Red Hat and other Linux distributors. ”
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Indeed, a new milestone in the history of open-source .

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