Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, May 14th, 2007

The dividing line between a junior reporter and an exceptional reporter: Steven Vaughan-Nichols covering MSFT’s latest legal FUD

Some good albeit randomly taken lines out of this article which is worth a read. SVN is once again on the exceptional side of that line for his ability to wade through all the mystery. I’m starting to question whether legal courses should be required components of any college degree. Core courses tend to include English, Mathematics, some Science, but not law which happens to govern quite a few aspects of most people’s personal and professional lives. Why is legal study reserved primarily for J.D. grad students? If everyone had a basic knowledge of IP law, most of the “mystery” that seems to surround legal FUD generation would simply go away. The way to fight these fears is through education. The only enemy to fear, is fear itself.

So, while Microsoft’s latest claims may sound terrible to the layman, any attorney worth his or her salt will know that these are old and basically bogus statements. So, why is Microsoft trotting them back out again?

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How are these programs violating the patents? Heck, which patents are being violated? We don’t know. Microsoft isn’t saying.

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Gosh, vague threatening IP (intellectual property) claims without any facts. Where have we heard that before? Could it be from early days of the long discredited SCO’s claims? The claims, which have fallen from grandiose heights to 326 unimportant lines of code?

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No, that’s not just open-source fanboy talk. Prominent open-source lawyers, like Eben Moglen, the executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center, believe that by distributing the SLES certificates, Microsoft has become a Linux distributor, and therefore subject to the GPL.