Florian Mueller, spokesman for the European NoSoftwarePatents.com and a leading anti-patent activist, thinks that may be the case. Mueller sees a recent Forbes interview with Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer as stopping just " short announcing patent litigation against Linux."

In the interview, Ballmer said, "Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy. And when there is something interesting to say, you'll be the first to hear it."

Mueller reasons that, "By 'intellectual property' he must mean patents. IP is a broad term and includes diverse rights, but it's hard to see how Linux would infringe any trade mark rights or copyrights held by Microsoft. However, given the size of the Linux code, it's almost certain that it will violate a number of patents, and some of them, such as the ones on the FAT file system, may indeed be held by Microsoft."

Others who are also concerned with open-source and patents don't see Ballmer's recent comments as being anything new.

"Well, I wouldn't say that [these comments are] noise, [but] it's actually less than they've said in the past," said Daniel B. Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation.

"The 'experts' I think [Ballmer is] referring to is my report from a couple years ago about Linux and patents. But, I've been over that and directly responded to his misinformed interpretation of that study," said Ravicher.

Specifically, though, in the current situation, Ravicher said, "I like Florian a lot, but I think I see this a little differently than he does. To me, these statements by Ballmer are nothing new. Of course, there's always a threat that Microsoft will use its patents against free software. I just don't think that this interview by Ballmer manifests an increase in that threat."




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