Brij’s One More Idea

Steve Ballmer is saying “What’s fair is fair” and dropping a not so subtle hint that Microsoft will be coming after those who are enjoying the fruits of open source without paying the patent toll (or troll) tax.

Timing and news coverage is bit fishy here.

Redhat launched RedHat exchange and further solidified their perceived leadership role in open source. Fud like the one Microsoft is raising can send mixed signal to companies hoping to join RedHat exchange. Who knows what might happen and who is trolling for what.

Second interesting aspect is about Fortune breaking this news. Fortune had been critical of open and free software in the past. Mostly by taking a stand that OSS/FOSS movement is anti-business.

Last point is more interesting and that concerns Google. Depending on how scared Microsoft is about Google and knowing Google runs all their data center servers on Linux this can have potentially interesting dimensions. Again this is all theory but lawyers tend to think very differently from engineers so we shouldn’t be surprised about the broad direction of fud, whereas Microsoft’s intended target could be very specific.

Blogosphere will wake up on Monday with full of anti-Microsoft posts. Diggers and Slashdotters will have field day with this.