You know all those nice things I said about the Microsoft Development environment a couple of weeks ago? Well, I still stand by them as a realistic opinion of the quality of the platform for developers. However, today’s news brings the major reason you should run away from depending on Microsoft technology like it had a case of Ebola.
The murmurs and worries about Microsoft’s ongoing patent gossip campaign, which came to a roiling boil with the Novell deal, have ended. Yep, no more rumors, just the plain reality that Microsoft is going to take their portfolio of laughable patents and start sticking it to the open source community legally, as spelled out in the most recent Fortune.
I’m trying really hard to avoid descending into obscenities here. So where-ever you see the * character, feel free to insert your own vulgarities as you see fit. * Microsoft has proved what a * bunch of * they are, and shown their true colors yet again. All the * about their open source lab and the code they were releasing as open source was in the end, just * propaganda, as many of us had suspected. Faced with omens such as Dell selling Linux on the desktop, they drew their last major card from the FUD deck, and hope to steal the pot.
And this is why you should use Microsoft technologies only as a very last resort. Because they don’t play nice with others. Sure, all companies are competitive and will do pretty much anything they can do to make a buck, but Microsoft is taking things to a new level. What you as a customer are being told, in essence, is that if you use any technology but Microsoft’s (or those of a company paying blood-money to Microsoft), you are likely to be sued. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to do business with people who threaten and extort me.
I suspect that this is going to be a tipping point on a number of fronts. Firstly, if Microsoft does more than bluster, they will set in motion events which will either end with the abolishment of software patents, or the descent of the computer industry into a morass of intellectual property shenanigans that will cripple it.
Secondly, this is either going to be IBM’s finest hour, or the end of a golden era. It was easy taking on punk SCO, and making them look like fools. Now, rather than fighting the North Vietnamese, they’re facing a direct confrontation with China, to strain an analogy. No one but IBM has anything like the resources to stand toe to toe and lawyer to lawyer with Redmond. But IBM is in a quandary, because if they challenge the Microsoft claims, they’ll also be de facto trashing their own carefully horded cache of software patents. What IBM decides to do will be a very telling sign for how this story will break as a whole.
Finally, this is the do or die moment for the FOSS community. Forget whether GPL 3 is better than GPL 2, or whether it’s free as in beer or free as in freedom, or all the other silly * that has been fracturing the community for years. There’s a wolf knocking at the door, and everyone who ever committed a line of code to a project has a stake in keeping it out. Now will be THE defining moment for Free/Open Source, because if Microsoft prevails, FOSS (at least in America or any country with strong IP ties to the US) will be dead, plain and simple. There’s no way that non-commercial projects will have the resources to check thousands and thousands of bogus patents for possible infringement.
I have no idea how the end game plays out on this. The recent Supreme Court ruling on the ‘obviousness’ of patents gives me hope for that branch, at least. However, I don’t trust the collection of fools we call our legislative branch not to screw it up royally with new laws. Just think how well the DMCA has been going so far. Will other companies band together with the FOSS community to fight Microsoft? After all, if those patents stand, those companies are in as much danger as any open source project. Will we end up mired in another five or ten years of legal wranglings? Pam Jones could have a job for life at Groklaw.
At the end, there’s only one thing left to say. For shame Microsoft, for shame. You’ve twisted competition into a thuggish debacle that ranks right up there with the worst of the great robber barons. How ironic that Bill Gates is trying to reinvent himself as the great philanthropist. Andrew Carnegie took much the same route late in his life, as if it could wash away his sins. We can only hope that in a few years, Steve Ballmer will look as much a fool as Daryl McBride does today.