There have been a lot of words written about the comments made by Microsoft"s CEO Steve Ballmer during a Q&A session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle last week. It was at this conference where Balmer declared that Linux used intellectual property patented by Microsoft.
Most seem to think that the claims are nothing more than FUD on the part of Microsoft and that nothing will come of it. But here"s a thought to ponder - what if it"s true and Linux does indeed infringe on one of more of Microsoft"s patents?
There"s at least a chance that Linux does indeed infringe on Microsoft"s patents. After all, Microsoft does hold a lot of patents and while Linux is open source and we can all take a look at the source code, only Microsoft has access to most of its source code so it isn"t all that difficult for it to prove – to itself at any rate – that there are IP infringements contained in Linux.
After all, before IBM handed over some 500 patents to the open source community, it"s pretty clear that Linux was infringing some of them.