Microsoft Expands on Alleged Patent Breaches
Linux Format is running with the Microsoft patent story today.
Microsoft is opening up a little into the detail of the alleged patent infringement. Namely MS have outlined these breaches.
“Free Linux software violates 42 patents. Graphical user interfaces, the way menus and windows look on the screen, breach 65. E-mail programs step on 15, and other programs touch 68 other patents…
Microsoft also said Open Office, an open-source program supported in part by Sun Microsystems Inc., infringes on 45 patents.”
Linux Torvalds replies with:
“Naming them would make it either clear that Linux isn’t infringing at all (which is quite possible, especially if the patents are bad), or would make it possible to avoid infringing by coding around whatever silly thing they claim,” he said.
“So the whole, ‘We have a list and we’re not telling you,’ itself should tell you something,” Torvalds said of Microsoft’s stance in the Fortune story. And for good measure, he added: “Don’t you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they’d just tell us and go, ‘nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!’”
I’ll leave it to others better qualified than myself to provide in-depth analysis of the impact of this but it still feels like FUD from where I’m sitting…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 11:01 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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