Reports from the Microsoft Asian Government Leaders Forum say that governments using the Linux OS could face litigation for intellectual property violations – without specifying whether Microsoft would be the ones suing.
“Some day,” Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer was quoted as telling forum participants, “for all countries that are entering the [World Trade Organization], somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property."
Ballmer is said to have told the forum participants that Linux violates over 228 patents, which some analysts suggest means Microsoft sees more implementation of “corporation-friendly” intellectual property law as “a weapon that can be used against software rivals,” as the British tech paper The Register put it.
“Clearly,” the paper said, “Microsoft's lawyers are busily plotting ways to embrace and extend this to handy new fields. It could be used to throttle emergent OSS companies, and it could conceivably be used to take the new generation of US (and maybe EU too) anti digital piracy and IP laws global.”
Almost needless to say, Microsoft denies that Ballmer told the forum either how many patents the company thinks Linux violates or that Microsoft itself is planning a litigation war of its own. MicrosoftWatch.com, a Web site that tracks the doings and undoings of the Redmond, Washington software empire, quoted the company as saying Ballmer was referring to “a controversial study” from summer that claimed Linux was found to have violated that many patents.
This came a day after Poland pulled out of the European Union’s patents directive, which could put the directive itself in jeopardy because Poland’s withdrawal could end up meaning the directive can’t draw in a qualified majority. While that could also prove a temporary setback, the Register said, those opposing software patents could be emboldened at any hint of Microsoft threatening a coming intellectual property war.
Reuters also reported the Ballmer comments and noted that one forum participant, Singapore, switched Ministry of Defense computers – about 20,000 – to run open-source operating platforms and not Microsoft, and other regional governments are looking to do likewise, with China, Japan, and South Korea striking a deal to develop open-source software jointly on the Linux platform.
“The Chinese government, in particular, sees its reliance on Microsoft as a potential threat,” Reuters said. “Conspiracy buffs believe certain patches in the Windows code might give U.S. authorities the power to access Chinese networks and disable them, possibly during a war over Taiwan.”
Tell it to Ballmer, who says such fears are only slightly exaggerated. "We think our software is far more secure than open-source software,” he was quoted as telling the forum. “It is more secure because we stand behind it, we fixed it, because we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software.”
