Nongeek perspective

Microsoft knows that Linux is not an operating system for geeks any more. It has reached the tech savvy market and Linux can reach the computer illiterate in a few years. The fear has lead Microsoft to a (IMHO) wrong FUD strategy. As you may know, Microsoft claims that Linux and other Open Source Software violates more than 230 of its patents and they want royalties. As Mary Jo Foley and this blog post (among many others) put clear, Microsoft must be putting pressure on FOSS vendors to make a deal as Novell did already and make users and developers run away from Linux. But other companies have successfully taken a different strategy.

In fact, the author of the study that claims that Linux "potentially violate 283 software patents" said that Ballmer got it wrong. However, Microsoft's threat is not new. They have made similar announces before and SCO filed a patent lawsuit earlier. Now, Microsoft is fanning the flame because their strategy has been partially unsuccessful (Microsoft have got license payments from some companies). But, why is Microsoft following this path? Obviously, Microsoft resists to lose market share, it just wants to continue being a monopoly.

However, other companies has taken a totally different path. IBM, Novell and Sun, just to name a few, have joined the Open Source movement and are making money with it. Adobe has a different approach to contribute by opening the specifications for some of their formats (pdf, swf, ps). Microsoft itself has taken many ideas from open source world or even from commercial products, for example:

• MSI packages. They were introduced in Windows 2000, as I remember. However, the concept of software packaging is older and comes from the open source land: rpm, deb are older than msi packages (not to mention tgz). Maybe we'll be seeing (official) windows repositories soon.
• XAML. I might be wrong but this idea seems to resemble XUL, an older GUI description format created by Mozilla. Both languages come from UIML.
• Aero. Linux users are enjoying Compiz/Beryl before Windows Vista release. This concept comes from Sun's looking glass project, though. Some features seems to come from Aqua.
• PowerShell. This functionality has been in Linux and other Unix-like system for years.
• The complete Graphical User Interface it's not a Microsoft idea.

So, Microsoft should stop "stealing" ideas and start to contribute actively to existing projects in a win-win way and this fact does not mean they're going to stop making money from their products.

One more thing. Microsoft it's threatened not only by Linux, but by some Internet companies like Google. Once again, Google is involved in Open Source …

As a final note, we must not forget that this problem is just a consequence of permitting software patents, as Glyn Moody said.

What do you think about it? Do you know about any other concept being used in Microsoft products that's not original from Microsoft? Please, let us know.