Put your money where your mouth is…
It really does look as though the big “M” has just upset too many people for this thing to be ignored or go away any time soon. All over the Internet there are blogs, news articles, wiki pages and even legal analysis of their patent infringement claims. And guess what? Nobody seems impressed at all.
In the last day or two several “counter” campaigns have started. Here are my favourites:
On the Digital Tipping Point Wiki, there is a list of over 600 users (and growing by the minute), asking for Microsoft to come on and sue them. (Some very funny comments and clear signs of anger in the community)
Here, http://www.linuxworld.com/columnists/2007/052107henderson.htm, Tim Henderson invites readers to create their own Linux distribution and register it at Distrowatch.com. The premise being that if there are a million distributions Microsoft will have to file a million lawsuits! (I thought this was a clever idea – very much in the spirit of Open Source)
Jonathan Schwartz (President & CEO of Sun Microsystems), on his blog yesterday said:
“… Sun has what I’d argue to be the single most valuable and focused patent portfolio on the web (and yes, we’d use it to defend Red Hat and Ubuntu, both)…”
The saga continues…