Ballmer is a shrewd billionaire businessman and Stallman is a fundamentalist leftist kook who wants all software to be free. You bet there's conflict.
Microsoft counters that it is a matter of principle. "We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property," says Ballmer in an interview. FOSS patrons are going to have to "play by the same rules as the rest of the business," he insists. "What's fair is fair."
Free software hippies like Stallman want to make countless free copies of other people's software then distribute it without paying a dime back to the originator. The US is currently losing billions as foreign governments especially communist ones are standardizing on these clones from Stallman and others using his software license.
The free world appears to be uncowed by Microsoft's claims. Its master legal strategist is Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, which counsels FOSS projects on how to protect themselves from patent aggression.
Hardly, they're in complete panic and Moglen recently announced he was stepping down as chief counsel. The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) also recently disbanded and was replaced by a more legal outfit than a "lab".
In response, companies began stocking up on software patents, with traditional hardware outfits like IBM leading the way, since they already had staffs of patent attorneys working at their engineers' elbows. Microsoft lagged far behind.
IBM recently sued Amazon over software patents, this is nothing new, the only thing that's new are the green party leftists like Stallman who think they're immune.
Yes, free software is a more sophisticated concept than many people think, and it is subject to a legally enforceable license of its own. That license was written by free-software inventor Richard Stallman, who set forth those goals in the GNU Manifesto.
Obviously Stallman is a leftist sham, his software isn't "free", it has it's own license and is based on his Marx like "manifesto".
That may be bad news for big corporate customers, which, judging from early reports, like the Novell deal. Presumably at least part of its appeal is that it provides peace of mind about Microsoft's patent claims. In the first six months, such marquee clients as Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, AIG Technologies, HSBC, Wal-Mart, Dell and Reed Elsevier have all acquired Novell Linux coupons from Microsoft.
Which drove the free software fanatics bananas. They really don't believe in free software, or free choice, they want to destroy intellectual property protections completely other than the ones that protect their viral license.
When it comes to software patents, though, Moglen thinks that's exactly the goal to be achieved. "The free world says that software is the embodiment of knowledge about technology, which needs to be free in the same way that mathematics is free," he says.
Further kookiness from these fruits, math is a numerical representation of nature, simply collecting and displaying that which happens naturally and is already there, while software is something that is developed for a purpose and has unique characteristics provided by the auhtor. These guys have been cloning other people's work and giving it away for free for years, now it looks like they may finally have to answer for it.
Don’t you think that with all the money MS has, they could afford a better shill?
Can you give me an example of where they've done so without explicit permission from the originator? If you can't, then where's the problem?
The latest news: MS refuses to reveal which of its patents are supposedly being violated in Linux. Makes me still happier that, after a long career in the Windows world, I went Mac three years ago. When a company stops innovating and starts suing, it's time to move on.