Mandriva to Microsoft: Take your patents and...

Mandriva has answered the call, and pre-announced this statement on Microsoft's patent game:

As far as patent protection is concerned, we are not great fans of software patents which we consider as counter productive. We also believe what we see, and until we see hard evidence from, say, SCO or Microsoft, that there are pieces of codes in our software that infringe existing patents, we will assume that any other announcement is just FUD. So we don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job.

A clear statement, and one that lays down good guidelines for Microsoft: if you want Mandriva to play, you need to provide a compelling reason to do so. Microsoft has not yet done so. Time to put up or shut up.

[Shankland]

Memories of SCO Group vs. Linux

Back in the earlier years of the SCO Group's attempt to profit from Linux, they filed their high-profile lawsuit against IBM, arguing that Big Blue violated its contract with SCO by moving proprietary Unix technology into open-source Linux. Some legal experts I talked to at the time thought the company would have been better off to start with small companies with less stake in the overall Linux movement, then try to build momentum with settlements from ever-larger Linux users and supporters. Instead they started with the biggest company with arguably the most at stake. Sure, if they could have gotten much of the industry to go along with it if they'd gotten IBM to roll over, but that was a big gamble.

It looks to me like Microsoft is adopting the start-small strategy, targeting Novell, which is under financial pressure, and really tiny Linux outfits like Linspire and Xandros. It's no surprise Red Hat and Canonical aren't playing along, but it's interesting that Mandriva, which is probably in the middle tier in terms of prominence, chose not to go along with Microsoft.