OStatic

As some OStatic readers have likely already heard, Microsoft is taking TomTom, a manufacturer of in-car navigation devices, to court for patent infringement. This is especially disturbing to those in the open source world for at least two reasons -- Microsoft's previous claims that Linux violates over two hundred patents it currently holds, and three of the claims against TomTom deal with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel in its products.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick presents some good analysis of the story, including links to the patents in question and those with particularly tenuous claims (in terms of infringement and patentability, in a few instances). While this is worrisome to those who use Linux, and certainly causing TomTom executives to lose sleep, I can't help but wonder, really, what this positioning actually means. Why is this coming up now? If hundreds of Microsoft patents are being violated, why go after a company infringing on eight (with three relating directly to Linux)? And why TomTom?

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Microsoft announced on Friday that it would be joining the Apache Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations in the open-source world. Microsoft became a platinum sponsor of the ASF, which costs $100,000/year and is the highest level of sponsorship that the foundation offers. In a blog posting announcing the sponsorship, Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy and head of its open source software lab, indicated that this demonstrates Microsoft's interest in working along with Apache on many projects. At the same time, he wrote that this does not mean Microsoft is turning its back on proprietary software, including its IIS Web server.

It's not every day that a Microsoft executive as highly placed as senior vice president, corporate secretary and general counsel Brad Smith shows up at an open source conference, but he made an appearance at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week. I enjoyed the title of InfoWorld's summary of his visit: Microsot's Brad Smith Tries to Make Nice with Open Source Community.

Making nice was probably part of his motivation, but there's more to it. Especially after a huge fine from the EU, Microsoft needs to take concrete steps to work more closely with open sourcers. Also, people keep missing how Microsoft's proposed Yahoo deal would force it to embrace open source.

As the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco gets underway this week, the tech publication is posting a series of interesting transcripts from roundtable discussions on open source topics. The roundtables include a number of well-known pundits, including CNet writer Matt Asay, Bruce Perens (credited by many as coining the term open source), Sam Ramji (senior director of platform technology at Microsoft), Zack Urlocker (vice president of products at MySQL) and many others. Much of the talk surrounds the trend toward commercialization of open source products.