Fri, 03 Nov 2006

Microsoft patent peace--or patent war?

I'm not sure what to think about this - patents can certainly be a two edged sword, and M$ has as much to fear from them as it does to gain. So one interpretation is that this could be a sort of "Declaration of Truce" to avoid an all out legal war, which would benefit no one except the lawyers.

But still given the level of FUD generated by Microsoft against various open source projects on the basis of IP rights, one has to wonder about their motivation. I'm guess I'm just gonna hope for the best.

By declaring a "patent peace" with Novell Linux, did the software company just declare patent war with the open-source realm?

(link) [CNET News.com]

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