14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is ready to jump on the same wagon with Microsoft on claims of intellectual property violations. "Microsoft is not the real threat" argues Shuttleworth, despite the fact that on May 14, 2007, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and Vice President of Intellectual Property and Licensing Horacio Gutierrez accused free and open source software of infringing on 235 Microsoft patents.
Moreover, Shuttleworth envisions a future in which Microsoft would join distributors of open source and free software in the fight against patents. "I don't think Microsoft is the real threat, and in fact, I think Microsoft and the Linux community will actually end up fighting on the same side of this issue. And I'm pretty certain that, within a few years, Microsoft themselves will be strong advocates against software patents. Why? Because Microsoft is irrevocably committed to shipping new software every year, and software patents represent landmines in their roadmap which they are going to step on, like it or not, with increasing regularity. They can't sit on the sidelines of the software game - they actually have to ship new products. And every time they do that, they risk stepping on a patent landmine," Shuttleworth explained his view.
Microsoft, as well as large distributors of open source solutions are perfect, sitting-duck targets for patent lawsuits. Just because they all have deep pockets. And patent suit would end up either in an settlement or in court. Shuttleworth predicts that even the deep pockets of Microsoft will - at a certain point - suffer heavily from the amounts directed at settling patent lawsuits. The only alternative is to scrap software patents altogether.
"So, Microsoft is not the real patent threat to Linux. The real threat to Linux is the same as the real threat to Microsoft, and that is a patent suit from a person or company that is NOT actually building software, but has filed patents on ideas that the GNU project and Microsoft are equally likely to be implementing," Shuttleworth added.