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More Patent Threats From Microsoft

By Pamela Jones et al.

Ina Fried has an interview with "Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer", Horacio Gutierrez, and Gutierrez directly threatens to sue any company, like Red Hat, that refuses to sell out and do a patent deal like the one Novell signed up for:

"If every effort to license proves not to be fruitful, ultimately we have a responsibility to customers that have licenses and to our shareholders to ensure our intellectual property is respected," he said.

So, more threats to try to force Red Hat to sign a deal that violates the GPL and that the GPLv3 makes very interesting in effects for Microsoft. I almost hope they mean it this time. Talk about anticompetitive use of patents, though. Nothing but the destruction of the FOSS development model and chosen license structure will do. No one I know, including FOSS lawyers, is losing any sleep over these threats.

Full post as published by Groklaw on October 18, 2008 (boomark / email).