Microsoft Wants Royalties from Linux!

What did I just say about Microsoft being a bunch of whiners?

The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google, Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore.

The conflict pits Microsoft and its dogged CEO, Steve Ballmer, against the “free world” – people who believe software is pure knowledge.

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. (He’s also a professor on leave from Columbia Law School, where he teaches cyberlaw and the history of political economy.)

Moglen contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable. (The Supreme Court has never expressly ruled on the question.) In any case, the fact that Microsoft might possess many relevant patents doesn’t impress him. “Numbers aren’t where the action is,” he says. “The action is in very tight qualitative analysis of individual situations.” Patents can be invalidated in court on numerous grounds, he observes. Others can easily be “invented around.” Still others might be valid, yet not infringed under the particular circumstances.

Moglen’s hand got stronger just last month when the Supreme Court stated in a unanimous opinion that patents have been issued too readily for the past two decades, and lots are probably invalid. For a variety of technical reasons, many dispassionate observers suspect that software patents are especially vulnerable to court challenge.

If push comes to shove, would Microsoft sue its customers for royalties, the way the record industry has?

“That’s not a bridge we’ve crossed,” says CEO Ballmer, “and not a bridge I want to cross today on the phone with you.”

Ballmer’s always been crazy, but I never thought he was crazy enough to threaten every individual software customer in the free world. Microsoft certainly doesn’t need the money, so we can only attribute this blatant travesty to insane greed.