Not just that. Don’t forget Novell (in particular) pushing the spread of Microsoft APIs, protocols, formats, etc, in many categories and extensively.

In any case, companies do what they do, but people/groups that support small players and end users benefit in being able to see risks and losses that come to these end users and small contributors.

This is the FSF’s in Bilski brief against software patents: http://endsoftpatents.org/amicus-bilski-2009

If software patents get the green light from SCOTUS (and if similar results take place across the EU), virtually all of FOSS can become illegal overnight at the whim of the groups holding and taking out basic patents (read: patents that cover vast ground and just barely meet the USPTO’s unobviousness standard — which is essentially every patent written by anyone in the industry) and anti-competitive extension patents to block their opponents (it’s relatively easy to take out extension patents on prior art to block off the growth of a given product or file format).

If software patents gain unambiguous legitimacy, OIN will likely be dissolved (eg, loss of funds), be signficantly weakened, or fail to act in FOSS’ best interest at any point in time in the future.

And trolls will likely step up their attacks.

Also those owning patents will grow in value proportionately to the number and believed leverage of such patents (this will do wonders for Microsoft, for example). Smaller companies and FOSS companies in general will find it very difficult to do business on anything resembling even terms (since at that point, not having thousands of patents to match the big fishes in the pond will start you off with a serious handicap).

With the leverage of (almost) free-and-clear FOSS gone, customers and small players (including proprietary players) will lose tremendous leverage. FOSS will stagnate most definitely at least until the markets consolidate so much that monopolies become worse than in the past or present and the patent question is forced into the light again for re-evaluation.

Legitimizing software patents will effectively levy a tax (or prohibition) on all areas of software development, and this tax will be controlled largely by a small number of entities not at all beholden to citizens and their voting power.

Those currently on the inside stand to gain a lot (if they survive the mergers, etc). This is one reason why some FOSS developers are currently supporting or tolerating software patents.

Everyone else will pay a stiff price.

I think there is a decent chance software patents will end up in a weaker state after SCOTUS rules, but if it doesn’t, there will be a significant backlash (many FOSS supporters taking out patents to stump existing areas of development across various companies’ product lines) against major patent-holding companies as developers and users realized what has happened and begin to see the consequences. Fact is that patents are extremely unfair and broad and don’t work in practice unless the fighting stays exclusively within a narrow group (as has traditionally been the case) instead of spilling out to affect most users directly and negatively. With the FOSS cat out of the bag, I think many users will be affected directly and negatively if FOSS is affected directly and negatively.

As an IT service consultant specialised in Windows and Virtualisation (vmware) I think Red Hat is doing brilliantly. They embrase Windows as their no 1 enhancer. People run Windows wether we like it or not. It’s got the mind share of a lot of people. By working with Microsoft Red Hat is able to provide something most other linux providers are not.

Because I work in virtualisation I often get a full view of a companies serverpark and 2 things strike me.
1. I’ve never seen a company without Windows
2. I see more and more of linux. (Mostly Red Hat, (open-)SuSe and Debian)

Without this cooperation with Microsoft Red Hat can’t expand it’s market share. The nature of most migrations is that it’s a graduate proces. The 2 systems need to coexist. And like the var guy says, Red Hat is going about it in a very open (source) minded way.

My (red) hat goes of to Red Hat.

Just my 2 cents.

No. They don’t need to. The objections to the MS/Novell deal has always been about their patent agreement and specific workarounds surrounding GPLv2 resulting in Novell paying royalties to MS. Red Hat has a very straight forward technical deal with no additional strings compared to the Novell deal.

I think this says a lot about how virtualization as a technology is able to empower business IT consumers to build out their infrastructure to match their specific business needs.

What’s really amazing is that MS is a party to the agreement without additional strings, I think that says a lot about how strong customer demand for interoperability really is. This stands in stark contrast to their prior partnership agreement with Novell which mixed interoperability benefits with patent restrictions. The real question now is can consumers push for guaranteed interoperability beyond the virtualization hypervisor or among a wider group of vendors.

Does this agreement put other vendors at a competitive disadvantage? Novell? Canonical? Do they need to get onboard and make similar interoperability guarantees to compete for paying business customers?

-jef