It appears that JVC is the latest company to sign a “patent deal” with Microsoft, according to Information Week. Although the terms of these “patent deals,” which Microsoft has made with a number of companies including Novell, Linspire, Xandros, Samsung, LG, are unclear, it appears that these deals are basically an agreement that Microsoft will not sue the company and its customers for using Linux, which Microsoft says it can do because Linux, according to Microsoft, infringes on 42 of its patents, which it will not name. You would think that this would be a simple issue of either the applicable teams fixing the problem(s) or a court case, but instead of allowing this to happen, Microsoft is refusing to tell anyone which of its patents it believes Linux infringes on, making it impossible for anyone to know if these patents even exist.

Since the first patent deal, which was between Microsoft and Novell, these deals have not received enough attention. It seems to almost not be news that Microsoft has collected more money from another company through a scare tactic. If Microsoft truly has important patents which Linux clearly infringes on, it would be in their best interest to revel them so that these companies know that they have to pay Microsoft money in order to avoid a very expensive law suit. This basically means that Microsoft either does not have the patents they keep talking about, the patents are on things that are so small they could be fixed before a law suit got started, or it is ambiguous if Linux really infringes on the patents. Whatever it is, Microsoft is essentially playing the big bully and making companies pay them just because they can.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Legal. 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.