Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company expects payment from computer users who run Red Hat Linux because the open source operating system violates Microsoft’s intellectual property rights.
“People [who] use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us,” Ballmer said at a company event last week in London. A video of Ballmer’s speech appeared this week on a Microsoft U.K. Web site.
Microsoft has long claimed that Linux and other open source software programs violate its patents. Last year, the company struck a deal with Linux distributor Novell under which it indemnified Novell Linux users from any legal claims. In return, Microsoft gained the right to re-sell certificates for Novell’s SUSE Linux at a mark-up.
Last week, Ballmer implied that users of Linux distributions from vendors other than those with which it has patent deals – the list also includes Xandros and Linspire – could be hearing from Microsoft. “We’ve spent a lot of money licensing patents,” Ballmer said.
Ballmer said Microsoft would like to create “an intellectual property framework” that bridges the commercial software and open source worlds so that users know where they stand with regard to using certain software programs.
He may not get much cooperation from the open source community, however. Linux advocates insist that the open source OS doesn’t step on Microsoft’s intellectual property and have publicly challenged the company to specify exactly which patents it believes have been violated.
Microsoft has thus far declined to do so.
I think that this is plain stupid … and the reason is “quite” obvious …
Fortunately I have not spent the 10 euros my mama gave me yesterday for lunch at school … lol :D:D:D
Microsoft has to get their heads out of their ass; THEY DON’T OWN COMPUTATION WORLD. The company is just butthurt cause there have been too many switches from Windows to Linux…
Quite seriously, Steve Ballmer needs to read Lou Gertsner’s book, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
Lou, in case Steve needs any reminding, was for many years the CEO of IBM… a company which by-the-way still has “small” divisions much-larger than all of Microsoft. (Microsoft, in fact, owes its entire existence to “a momentary mistake” of “one particular small division of” IBM…)
Steve Ballmer is, today, spending entirely too much time listening to lawyers, when his time and effort could be much better spent by listening to another “Steve”… such as, oh, Steve Jobs.
Lawyers, after all, claim to be “the ultimate trusted friend” to a business, but when the dust finally settles they are nothing more than “businessmen, themselves.” Their ‘solution’ to your ‘problem’ is (suh-prize!) more lawyering! Which basically means that, in their “professional opinion,” anything that your competitor might be doing to beat-your-sox-off must be “illegitimate!”
Ahem.
Like it or not… (sorry, Steve-B)… you are not going to defeat your competition by declaring whatever-they-are-doing to be “illegal.”
They’ve got nothing. This is just more FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) tactics to try to scare the more conservative IT people out of adopting linux, as they have been.
It’s fairly easy to patent an idea, but it’s entirely different to prove it in court. M$ knows this.
They refuse to divulge which patents they believe have been violated. Until they do, any financial claim they make on the average linux user is nothing more than extortion.
It will be interesting to see how the upcoming court case pans out.
As a linux user, I aint paying a cent to M$ until they explain EXACTLY why I should.
You didn’t know he enjoys a pastime of throwing furniture?
Ballmer is the excrement that perpetuates itself from the devil’s ass.
Just ignore him. Micro$oft could never win a war against open-source, which is why all they do is spread FUD from behind a concrete wall with nothing to actually back it up with.
They have the worst management and business practices for being so big, it will bite them in the ass.
What’s wrong with Windows? The OS has been very good to me so far, I never had XP crash on my computer, I cause Blender to crash more times. Yes I like the company you often call Micro$oft or Money$oft.
BTW: The Redhat devs. are now designing manholes like these, to show the power of their OS (too late to fix the spelling)
