I’ve been so disgusted since yesterday evening when I found out that Microsoft is alleging Linux of patent infringement, but today a few articles have calmed me down:

This is, to me, Darl II: “Our precious IP is worth beeelions, and you must honor our sacred intellectual property, which is behind this curtain. We can’t exactly show you or identify it with specificity, but trust me, it’s worth oodles and boodles, and you are violating it. We just can’t show you precisely where and how. But we don’t want to sue you, so we will let you use Linux anyway, if you just sign on the dotted line and pay us for code we didn’t write but we’d like to tax because it’s winning in the marketplace and we don’t know how to make money fair and square against it.”

— Groklaw

The author of the study that Microsoft cited, Dan Ravicher, says:

“Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.”
…
“The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] about Linux’s alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation,” he said. “And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.”

— eWeek

Linus Torvalds responded to the claim:

“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!’”

— Information Week

Of course, even if Microsoft doesn’t sue anybody over these mysterious patent infringements, this kind of talk still tarnishes the name of Linux and open source software in general, which is what’s so damn frustrating to me. Pointy-haired bosses may be starting to explore outside their current Microsoft cage, catch wind of legal troubles with this hippie Linux stuff, and bail out before they’ve even begun. What does it take to constitute slander or libel, anyway?