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In today’s headline, I just read a report that Microsoft may in the as-of-yet undetermined future launch a lawsuit for patent infringement against OSS establishments. By the way, OSS stands for Open-Source Software. Rob Enderle, a well-respected fellow in the IT community and who sits on the advisory council for major corporations such as IBM, Toshiba, AMD, HP, Dell, Philips, and the Trusted Computing Group, comments in his blog that the “Linux Foundation as a proxy for Linux, IBM as the largest non-licensed supplier (and contributor) to Linux, and Red Hat as the most powerful branded Linux distribution owner” are the most likely targets for Microsoft’s lawsuits.

He quickly dismisses the idea the Linux Foundation will be one of Microsoft’s top target based on the reasoning that the Linux Foundation has really no financial rewards if the case is favourably won for Microsoft and the outcry and support by the OSS community could have negative repercussions and consequences not yet known. He goes to explain that IBM is too much of a force to be reckoned with much legal expertise and experience in the defense of its own patent portfolio and definitely a financial prowess in its own right that Microsoft will be extremely hard-pressed to successfully defend its claim of 235 patent violations.

So the clear, lone target left would and could possibly be Red Hat Linux who does not have a clear backing of the Open-Source Software community and who still has enough financial resources that it would be worth their efforts. Furthermore, he points out that Red Hat Linux is publicly known and the legal case would generate enough publicity that the warnings to others who may be in violation of their patents can be enough to subdue opponents to eventually conform and comply. He notes, “The most exposed will be those in companies which have policies against OSS products and are intentionally violating these policies.”

There’s no doubt that there is a real concern about the use of open-source software as this article on Management ’scared’ by open source suggests. There are variations upon variations of what is considered to be truly open-source such as the BSD and the GPL licenses and its variants of these components that compound the lack of understanding and increase the confusion in the community.

Personally, I believe open-source will never go away and there will always be problems surrounding legal issues of “this code was stolen from this programmer” as there are incessant legal issues and battles surrounding estate ownership, inheritance and wills. Essentially, the legal battles are fought where the money tends to fly or fall. Though Rob Enderle counsels to avoid any use of open-source except in the cases where there is high degree of clearance of any pending lawsuits, in my opinion, I do not see a need to offer such counselling. HP and Novel customers appear to be in this realm of clearance. The magic word is “appear” for we know in the litigation world that “appearances” of semantics can be very deceiving.

For most folks I believe this won’t be a problem since most folks I believe won’t be brought into the legal arena since it’s not worth Microsoft’s time to invest valuable resources. They will specifically target companies, perhaps, such as Red Hat Linux to be set as an example and thus through them enforce policy changes and compliance. It seems more a like a tactic of “vendor scaremongering to drum up new business” as writer Gavin Clarke suggests in Management ’scared’ by open source.

I say onward with open-source software as I believe the people and the community will decide the fate. The community and people the world over are backed by sheer volume of numbers and it’s a force that is, without doubt, a formidable one. The people who end up voting for the senate, the House of Commons electorate and every other level of government will lobby for new policies to perhaps one day institute or cause to institute open-source license that is standardized to prevent these legal misinterpretations arising out of initiatives like the GPLv3. I’m hopeful for the future in this regard but not in others (Study finds rich-poor income gap growing, Disparity between rich and poor widening).

Harvest for Christ

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.