Microsoft’s hollow blow to open source community.

“Microsoft claims that Linux and other open source products violate about 235 of its patents.” This news it been circulated around lately. Several questions come to mind when you read this caption. Is this Microsoft’s new corporate tactic to get even with the open source community? Do Open source products really violate Microsoft patents? If yes, then what was Microsoft doing all these years?

I think this is more of a corporate tactic and the accusation is baseless. The MNC has not yet come up with the list of patents which are violated as claimed. Linus Torvalds has come up with a retaliating response to the accusation. He says that Microsoft violates more patents than anyone does (I somehow feel that this accusation is true :) ) and has challenged the corporation to come up the list of patents which are violated.

These days many corporations are turning towards open source products. Use of such products do not require procuring of licenses, you need not pay any hefty amount as part of procurement. Last but not the least, the source code will be available (under GPL license of course :) ). Thus, the support extended to the open source products makes sense in this context :). IBM is a supporter of Linux. All these factors have proved as a threat to anti-open source organization like Microsoft.

Summarizing the entire issue, one could say that Microsoft is trying to create a storm out of nothing.

Ps: Microsoft has decided not to sue Linux users.

The following links will provide more info :

Microsoft’s claim

Linus Torvalds’s response