Dear Mr. Ballmer,

Last week at one of your events “across the pond” you, yet again, went on to attack Linux. Well, customers of Red Hat more specifically, and I guess I’m not a Red Hat customer. I wasn’t even there. Hell, I jump to the defense, anyway. I saw the video. Perhaps I’ll become a Red Hat user. Perhaps Fedora, they are sponsored by Red Hat. Does that put me in the crosshairs?

What you said was:

“People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense, have an obligation, eventually, to compensate us. We spend a lot of money, the rest of the commercial industry spends a lot of money, on R and D. When people come and say ‘hey this commercial piece of software violates our patent or intellectual property,’ Microsoft will either get a court judgment or it’ll pay a big check. I think it’s important that open-source products have an obligation to participate in the same way, in the intellectual property regime. That’s why Microsoft’s done the deal with Novell. It’s not only working on technical interoperability between Linux and Windows, but it’s also made sure it can provide, for the appropriate fee, Novell customers with the rights to use its patented intellectual property. I think it’s great the way Novell has stepped up to say intellectual property matters.”

Bull. According to a Network World article from May, “The patent agreement between the two companies seems to make it clear that Novell does not accept any of Microsoft’s patent claims. Section 3.4 says, ‘Nothing in this Agreement shall imply, or be construed as an admission or acknowledgment by a Party, that any Patents of the other Party are infringed, valid or enforceable.’” Novell made absolutely no admission to the infringement of your “IP”, and I attest that GNU/Linux infringes on not one of the 235 or so patents you claim.

I, and the others that come to the defense of Linux, carry the burden of proof on my side. I am not the one making the outrageous claim, you are. I’ll repeat what hundreds have said before, first to Caldera/SCO, then to you, show us the code. Put up, or shut up. Linux is open source, and that means, we’ve shown you ours. Now show us yours. I know about the OSRD report that you have. It says that there are 283 pending, not yet court-validated, patents of which Linux may possibly be in violation. 27 of which are possibly related to Microsoft.

Now, if you’re unwilling to provide proof to substantiate your accusations, then you should try to keep yourself from making them. I’m pretty sure that deep down you know you’re full of it, but I am a Linux user. And, again, you’ve offended me. So please, try and find it in your conscience, assuming you can find your conscience, to shut the FUD up.

Sincerely,

One Concerned Linux User

bryan@troubledramblings.com

P.S. To all others, read more about Steve’s recent ramblings at PC Pro where they have a link to the video.