As of
September 2007, no specific patent infringements have been pointed out by anyone.
To many in the Linux community, statements from Microsoft in which Microsoft threatened to sue
Linux developers, users, and customers who don??™t pay a fee to Microsoft (for code that Microsoft
had no part in creating) are viewed as extortion. The result has been to divide open source proponents
into either the camp for the Novell/Microsoft deal or against it. However you look at it, the
battle lines have been clearly drawn.
The U.S. Justice department claimed that Microsoft used the phrase ???Embrace, extend, and extinguish???
as its policy toward dealing with companies or technologies that it saw as a threat (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish). By embracing SUSE Linux,
Microsoft has already divided the Linux community. It has announced plans to extend SUSE Linux
to better interoperate with Windows. You can only guess what might happen to SUSE when
Microsoft??™s five-year deal with Novell is up and much of the open source community isn??™t working
with Novell anymore.
But it??™s not all gloom and doom for Linux. Major Linux vendors such as Red Hat, Inc. and the
Free Software Foundation have been gearing up for this fight for years.
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