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Administrator
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 11/11/2008 9:24:04 PM
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| OPEN SAUCE group Open Invention Network (OIN) has called Microsoft's bluff on its sabre-rattling claims that Linux infringes some of its patents, reports Australia's IT News.
CEO of OIN Jerry Rosenthal believes that Microsoft's statements are empty threats. He says the Vole should either disclose exactly which patents its talking about or cut out slandering Linux and drop its claims.
"The FUD is clear. If you have a patent that you are proud of, then disclose it," Rosenthal said. "If your patent is a good patent then you are not worried about revealing it before going to court because you would be confident of success."
OIN and many open sauce developers suspect that, if Microsoft actually has any software patents to back up its bluster, those could either be invalidated by finding prior art or easily worked around with programming changes.
The president of the Open Source Consortium, Mark Taylor, was even more direct in denouncing Microsoft's patent claims about Linux. He said, "We say show us the patents. This has been the strategy against open source all along. It's precisely the same tactics as SCO used: implied threats and mafia techniques. This is just FUD. It's smoke and mirrors."
It's doubtful that Microsoft really wants to get into a software patent war with OIN, which has millions of dollars in a patent litigation war chest. In addition, OIN's members include Google, IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony. Microsoft could find itself on the defensive if actually goes to court against all of those companies over software patents. µ
AMD64 X2 5200+ 2.60GHz | 3GB DDR 667 | RAID 0 SATA3.0 WD Caviars 320GB total | Foxconn MCP61VM2MA-RS2H Geforce 6100 nforce400 chipset | Vista Ultimate x86
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