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RSS FeedMicrosoft Says Free and Open Source Violates 235 Patents
Submitted by Aaron Pava on May 13, 2007 - 11:49pm.
A new article on ZDNet says that Microsoft is claiming that free and open-source software violates more than 230 of its patents.
Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs.
Legal strategist Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation, and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable.
In 2002, Microsoft applied for 1,411 software patents and by 2004 the number grew to 3,780. Beginning December 2003, Microsoft's new licensing unit opened and signed cross-licensing pacts, exchanging either royalties or access to their patents, with companies like Sun, Toshiba, SAP and Siemens.
Yet, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is a more sophisticated concept than most people think, and it is subject to its own legally enforceable license. That license was written by free-software inventor Richard Stallman, who 20 years ago anticipated the threats that FOSS faces today. Foremost among these threats are patents.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) is used to guarantee users "freedoms" that have been ordinarily forbidden by proprietary software licenses, including the ability to see the source code, alter it, copy it and redistribute it. All contributors to GNU projects have assigned their copyrights to the Free Software Foundation.
Of course, the other side of the story is that a new deal struck between Microsoft and Novell means that Microsoft was now a Linux distributor and itself subject to the terms of the GPL, says Eben Moglen. The new version of the GPL addresses these types of deals and when it goes into effect soon.
It looks like both sides are getting ready to battle!
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CNN Money is running a thorough story from Fortune, "Microsoft Takes on the Free World".
Late last year I sat down with Eben Moglen and recorded a short video for the Free Software Foundation in which Eben alluded to the potential for a major patent war, what the CNN report refers to as "Patent Armageddon".
The unfolding of this story is not just esoteric geekery, it has vast implications for computer systems all around us and the future of the software "industry" and the software "community".