What do you do when you can’t crush the competition with skill or innovation? You litigate them to death. Microsoft appears to have chosen this centuries-old practice to rid the world of Linux, OpenOffice, and something that the following article quotes only as “the Linux graphical user interfaces” – presumably KDE and/or Gnome.
The interesting part, though, is that while most of the time this sort of thing has involved suing the company that’s the source of whatever you’re trying to bury, Microsoft chose a different tactic:
Since the GPL covered only distributors of Linux, nothing stopped Smith from seeking royalties directly from end users – many of which are Fortune 500 companies. He would have to proceed carefully, however, because most of those users were also major Microsoft customers.
[...]
Some customers actually entered into direct patent licenses with Microsoft at that point, Smith says, including some “major brand-name companies” in financial services, health care, insurance and information technology. (He says they don’t want to be identified, presumably because they fear angering the FOSS community.)
This is a really neat example of the cowardice of the free market. It’s not in anyone’s best interest, financially, to take on Microsoft. The numbers never work out in your favor, so you never do it. It’s sad, really.
We’ve been listening to Stallman gripe about ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ and moral imperatives since the 1980’s, but few took him seriously. Now, the largest software company in the world is trying to wipe out the largest free-software project in the world – the Linux kernel – and thanks to patent protection, it’s a very real possibility it could happen. If it became illegal to provide Linux to anyone, would Torvalds have to flee back to Finland? Would it be possible to engineer around Microsoft’s patents or are they so broad that it would be impossible to write a disk driver or a GUI with tabs without infringing on a MS patent?
I remember watching a late-night scifi movie where computer ownership was illegal, and thinking that could never happen. But it is happening. Mark my words: 20 years from now, computing will be very, very different. “Computers” will be overpriced little boxes, like gaming consoles, that are illegal to modify in the U.S. They will run only “signed” code from companies like MS or DRM’ed media from record companies. Indie movies and music will be forced underground, as will Linux and many other supporting free-software projects. Illegal reverse-engineering, running your own apps and playing your own media will be just as illegal as mod-chipping or phone unlocking is now.
This is the “freedom” that the market grants us. Pathetic.
I guess it’s time to start stockpiling books. You can’t pay-per-view a paperback (yet.) Let’s hope that even though Stallman was right, Bradbury wasn’t.
