Microsoft's intent on forcing IP into IT talk

Is Microsoft the last holdout on an outmoded way of doing business, or is it the vanguard for intellectual-property licensing schemes that herald a new age of competitive cooperation?

Horacio Gutierrez, a friend and vice president of intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft, believes that it's the latter and argues that the best way to ensure true interoperability while simultaneously competing is through patent cross-licensing arrangements:

At the heart of these business arrangements is an honest recognition of the value of the intellectual assets that drive innovation. Such arrangements strike a balance between intellectual-property incentives that encourage, recognize, and reward innovation, and practical mechanisms for sharing intellectual property that are responsible, accessible, and affordable.

At Microsoft, we have created many such business arrangements--more than 500 in just five years--through the licensing of our intellectual property...In the coming months, we will continue to forge such agreements, and we call upon others to do the same.

Carefully crafted intellectual-property licensing deals help all of our customers maximize their IT investments by making sure hardware and software work well together, and they facilitate the sharing of intellectual assets through pragmatic business agreements that drive greater innovation and value in the IT marketplace.

Point taken, but this overlooks one major obstacle to such arrangements: need. Microsoft convinced Brother recently to license its patents so that Brother can run Linux drivers in some of its devices. Did you catch the oddity in there? Microsoft doesn't make drivers, Linux-based or otherwise. What intellectual property of Microsoft's did Brother need to license?

Only Microsoft knows, and it's not telling, despite repeated requests for Microsoft to open up on the patents it alleges that Linux violates. It's fine for Gutierrez to claim that intellectual property is the foundation for competition and cooperation, but when Microsoft is only willing to cooperate behind closed doors, it smacks of extortion, not partnership.

Microsoft has aggressively been acquiring patents over the years--10,000 of them now--and undoubtedly, these come in handy when doing broad cross-licensing pacts with other patent giants, such as IBM. But it's unclear why patents must be the gateway to cooperation, a fact pointed out by Microsoft's recent interoperability partnership with Red Hat, which included no patent licenses.

The foundation for partnership is trust, not intellectual property--something I've been telling Microsoft for years. Intellectual property must be respected, to Gutierrez's point, but Microsoft's fixation with intellectual property as the foundation for meaningful cooperation will prove its biggest stumbling block, and not its winning argument.

Microsoft should look around to see how IBM and other big patent holders use their patents. IBM seems to be able to work with open source just fine without waving its patent portfolio around. Microsoft should do the same.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

[irperez]

You talk about Microsoft, but don't forget about Apple! They are even worse than Microsoft when it comes to this. At least microsoft communicates with its developers and tries to help them.

[Maccess]

Most of Apple's patents have to do with the interface and hardware design. Apple doesn't have any patents on the underlying OS because it isn't theirs, Mac OS X runs on an open source BSD, Mach Kernel. Remember Darwin?

[Dalkorian]

No one is worse than M$. Period. No one is talking about Apple in any way, except you and your fellow trolls. Trolling fail.

[Inconnux]

microsoft is the exact opposite of trust.

[umbrae]

Amen... MS is going to end up doing badly if they continue with behavior.

[Matt Asay]

What I can't understand is why Microsoft largely stands alone in this approach to open source. Everyone from IBM to MySQL/Sun to Richard Stallman wants to have its copyrights (and patents, where applicable) respected. But only Microsoft seems to want to *start* the conversation with patents, rather than ending it there. It's like telling the world that the world has syphilis, and then following that up with, but we really like you and want to buddy up with you!

[Penguinisto]

Pffft! They only preach cross-licensing just to try and stay relevant. Everyone else is ditching that and going for open standards instead.

[rapier1]

Trust? You're going to base a business model on *trust*? Hey, I guess it could work as long as no one is going to abuse that trust but it seems to me that there is *always* going to be someone that wants to abuse it.

[tm_anon]

You mean how Brother trust MS to have told the truth? Let's see those patents and the proof that they're being violated.

[Dalkorian]

Extortion doesn't work nearly as well when your lies are brought to light.

[t8]

Microsoft have cost companies billions of unnecessary dollars. I am a web developer and the amount of extra code one has to do to make a website work in IE is wasteful. If Microsoft stuck to open standards in the first place, then we wouldn't have all this wasted effort just supporting their crap.
This is but one example of abuse in their monopoly.

The sooner the world moves away from them the better. I see Cloud Computing as the best chance to free us from dependence on them and I am Microsoft free except for Windows. One day I hope to ditch that too. I hope XP is the last OS I will use from them.

[Nataku4ca]

a bit exaggerating dont u think? and as far as cross browser speaking, yes ie when a stray the most but even if it is gone u will still have to work hard to make most browsers display properly,

hell opera, firefox, and safari behaves differently too and i dont want to get into kkman, konqorer and all the really tiny ones

and i repeat once more ie need to get closer to the others, but that doesnt mean u can forget browser compatibility

[tm_anon]

Ubuntu kicks XPs ass. If you want to stop using Windows, do it today.

[Dalkorian]

I'm with tm_anon here, Ubuntu is worth a try. You can burn it onto a disc and run it from there to try it out - without even installing it! If you like what you see, partition off a bit of space and install it *NEXT* to winblows. That way if you feel you need that "insecurity blanket", you still have it.

I only ever fire up ex-pee to run games anymore. Everything else is done in Ubuntu.

[jezzali]

Enough of this "IP" crap ! If you want to take a case to court I guarantee you "IP" is not a legal nor meaningful term.