Microsoft Sees No Conflicts With Patent Initiatives 84
AlexGr writes "According to Eweek's Peter Galli, Microsoft sees no contradiction between its open-source community building efforts and the more-than-thinly-veiled legal threats at Linux and other projects. Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, actually states: 'One makes the other possible, especially at a time like this, when interoperability is so important. Microsoft recognizes the importance of interoperability, which is why we are doing the things we are in our products, why we created the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, and why we are listening to customers.'"
How could it? (Score:5, Insightful)
MS is a corporation. So among other things, we know that:
(1) It doesn't actually "see" anything. It's comprised of individual humans (mostly) that see things.
(2) Because it's actually a collection of minds that don't necessarily agree with each other, it doesn't tell us much that it's engaging in two actions that are potentially un-reconcilable. When we hear that a *person* "sees no conflict", we find that interesting because we figure maybe the person has discovered some reason that they two ideas in question can be reconciled. For a corporation of multiple persons, maybe no such reconciliation of the two ideas exists.
Plus it's also quite plausible that MS management has private motives that are very different than its public motives. In that case perhaps the (inauthentic) public motives are in logical conflict, but the private motives held by MS's management are actually completely self-consistent.
Another open letter (Score:3, Insightful)
Brad Smith & Co: If you're listening at all, just give up the threats or sue us. Piss or get off the pot. Otherwise, maybe some open source developers might get fed up and sue YOU for slander and libel.
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you surprised?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Law in economics (Score:4, Insightful)
There needs to be a law in economics that states that any corporation big enough, will starts to show symptoms of the corporate equivalent of Alien hand syndrome [wikipedia.org] once it has crossed a specific size.
The recent mix-up at Microsoft (one hand is trying to be nice to open-source because FOSS is the current hyped buzzword of the day while at the same time the other hand is desperately trying to find a way to crush this "evil" concurrence that threatens to overthrow them from their dominant position in the market) is a perfect illustration of such dual minded corporate behaviour (for the exact reason stated above : it's made up of too many people to have a single coherent goal).
This does make sense, in a twisted way (Score:2, Insightful)
However, Microsoft's point here is that they're happy to make patent licensing agreements (like the Novell deal) with open source software vendors. Remember, MS has stated publicly that they're happy to make the Novell deal with Red Hat, Canonical, etc.
If you're MS, and your goal is to make more Novell deals, then it makes perfect sense to make noise about your patents.
Re:Another open letter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quick, everyone chant... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a market developing in Free software - a small market, mind you, at the moment, but showing every sign of growing - and Microsoft want to own it. It's as simple as that.
Doesn't mean they actually need to produce Free software though - they just need to own the mindspace. Their strategy over the last few years, right up to the recent events, has amounted to
- "Oh, but we do embrace free software"
- "Uh, but we're cautious because there may be some IP problems associated with it"
- "Look - we said there may be IP problems, and we found some!"
The next step being, of course- "Hey, but as long as you stick to MS-brand "Free" software, you'll be fine..."
It may be 4 steps rather than the stereotypical 3, but "Profit!" is still at the end of it...