Saw this on slashdot... Microsoft exec Steve Ballmer claims that Linux "uses our intellectual property"
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;839593139;fp;16;fpid;1 Now I'm upset, because I thought Microsoft actually wanted to work together with Novell on file formats and virtualization and all that, but in the end, it was actually just a smoke screen. I think it's time people start rolling out some BoycottNovell websites. The world needs to know that it is not acceptable to pay the pigs for something that was developed in an open fashion, and by an open source community. Along with boycotting Novell, this is just all that much more reasoning to promote Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, (i.e. non-commercial Linux) to new (and corporate) users. Even bigger picture... apparently, the SCO thing was the best case anyone could come up with for the "stolen intellectual property" argument, and now that argument has been lost, the only thing left for the pigs to fall back on is the patent royalties issue. It is much harder to sue for outright ownership or massive damage claims in the patent world, (as it would be easy if you could claim stolen source code), as courts tend to rule that patent payments be "reasonable", etc... so now the pigs are left suing for royalty payments, and they would be smaller, royalties for specific items. Although, even if the pigs get $0.01 per user, they will still claim victory. This is a sad period in history for software and computing in general. Let's hope for some changes in software patent laws in 2007. (And, if Microsoft does eventually sue someone because they use Linux, I recommend going EVERYWHERE, to every one of your managers and co-workers, and pointing out that Microsoft is so evil they sue their end users and customers. If they're going to be pigs, we can tarnish their reputation by pointing out what they do.)
