Quote:
Originally Posted by Crovax
Actions speak much louder than words, so I'll start worrying about it when Microsoft actually starts a lawsuit against Torvalds or something.
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There's no point in suing the developers; they don't have any money, and they're scattered around the world. The more appealing target would be Fortune-100/500 corporations using open source software on servers (desktops aren't an issue in most companies yet).
SCO, for instance, tried to get corporations to pay them $699 per Linux server to "license" the portions of Linux that allegedly infringed SCO's Unix (and, whether SCO owns "Unix" or not is being litigated by SCO and Novell). SCO's
suit against Autozone for alleged infringement is wending its way through the courts.
There are many large corporations that have replaced Windows servers with Linux boxes in the data center to run software like Oracle. This is the trend that worries Redmond the most, followed by losing control of the office software marketplace to OpenOffice. (Some countries and US states have adopted the OpenDocument format, which OO supports, and are abandoning MS formats because they are proprietary.) I don't think they're really all that worried about Dell shipping Ubuntu boxes in the short term, though who knows where things will stand in another decade.