CNET news.com
By Ina Fried, and Stephen Shankland

Microsoft claims that free and open-source software violates more than 230 of its patents, according to a magazine report published Sunday.

In an interview with Fortune, 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.org is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs, according to Fortune.

Read article here

They never give up do they?

actually they are claiming 235 patent violations.

I wrote about it in my blog

Yet another piece bullshit from Microsoft. Linux and all had been around for years. Decades. How long would you take to discover whether Linux was violating patents?

The newsfeed said 235 and the story title said 230. "More than 230..." is stated in the article itself. They don't seem to be too sure do they?

I like the news in your blog's latest post.

hehe, so do I, so do I

jwh400,

I'm pretty sure that fancy smiley you used is covered by one of the 235 MS patents. You should expect a visit from Mr Balmer. The rest will no doubt turn out to be things like 3mm window borders, coloured title bars and and putting little arrows on the scroll bars. If the lawyers are let loose this whole thing is going to be so much fun to watch.




[quote=jwh400;3866]The newsfeed said 235 and the story title said 230. "More than 230..." is stated in the article itself. They don't seem to be too sure do they?

I like the news in your blog's latest post. SMILEY REMOVED TO PROTECT MS PATENT

FUD. They've been doing this every six months for a couple of years. If they weren't afraid their patents would get laughed out of court a'la SCO, they'd have sued a long time ago.

wow, if ms can do it, why doesnt apple sue ms for cprwrte infringement on OS X?

Oh yeah, b/c they're out of their minds.

*High Five*

As far as I'm concerned, I refuse to pay any royalty until they can prove anything.

Code is like speech, you can't patent everything because we wouldn't be able to say anything otherwise. It's too limited.

microsoft sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i doubt "microsoft sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" counts as a post... Isnt there a set of rules that state what to post / anti-spam posting? Or did MS patent anti-spam, too?

*Im on a rollllllll!*

PJ from Groklaw doesn't seem worried :

Groklaw - Ooh, ooh, the bogeyman is gonna getcha with his stupid patents. Or maybe not.

Another FUD from Microsoft. Do we still want to talk about it???

Yep, I'm not especially worried, especially after reading that Groklaw article. One, most of the patents are either quashable with prior art, obvious (which is much easier to prove since the recent SCOTUS decision) or counterable with Open Source defensive patents.

Also, since Microsoft and Novell entered that deal, which involved a byzantine trade of money for coupons for SUSE Linux, that makes Microsoft technically a distributor of Linux, and thus bound by the GPL, meaning they're required to make any patents they have that are used in Linux distros freely available to all.

*Fumes for a while.*

Man. I thought I'd calmed down since I posted on my blog about it. But now I'm all riled up again.

This is the last straw! Grab your AK-47 and lets storm Redmond!

*Deep breath.*

Ah, I feel better now. I can wait for Micro$loth to die slowly and painfully, which is basically what's happening anyway.

SigmaX

If MS died, the US economy would collapse.

No it wouldn't.

In fact, it'd give the US's economy a kick in the pants in the tech sector as demand for IT people and programmers would go through the roof as companies scrambled to make their windows-only apps cross-platform and old Microsoft shops make the switch on their next upgrade cycle for the next 5 years or so.

You're forgetting microsoft owns more money than the US economy has.

General Motors use to have that opinion of themselves.

Money that stays in one place is useless for the economy as a whole. It's money movement that matters.

And the poster above me is spot on.