Redmond's Lawyers Ride Again

Apple. Open source software. The faint knowledge that, with the possible exception of Excel, pretty much everything your company has ever done has been derivative of other's efforts, whether it's a direct copy, or innovation at the margins. And the developer community really doesn't like you. Even the Europeans are busting your chops.

Man, it's hard for Microsoft.

So they're going after the open source movement on the basis of two hundred cases of patent infringement - cases where some quirk or feature of the software was, they say, invented by Microsoft first. Paul McDougall, blogging for InfoWeek, observes:

What choice does Microsoft have? It's basically lost the Internet to Google. If Linux and other free software continues its march toward mainstream (don't underestimate the significance of Dell's decision to ship Ubuntu Linux for the desktop) what's left for the company?

And I'm not a lawyer, but I've heard in many places that American patent law, which matured for years in the material world of "stuff", is woefully inadequate when it comes to the bizarre digital world of software. The flow of information and interaction with the user can be abstracted into so many obtuse subcomponents that it takes a special kind of expertise to really understand the territory. Few brains are given to both dexterity with the law and an intimate understanding of the subtle mysteries of a low-level API.

Curious that no information has been released yet about which of Microsoft's specific patents have been infringed. Once this information goes public I suspect the open source community will respond so vigorously - identifying the various non-Microsoft pedigree of the software element in question, and even re-coding when necessary - that the brigade of attorneys from Redmond will be quickly overwhelmed.

Be very careful before going to war with a distributed, resilient system.