Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The thought of Microsoft suing Sun Microsystems for infringing patents it holds for Microsoft Office seems ludicrous. However, according to a leading open source expert that's what Microsoft will have to do if it is serious about trying to uphold its claim that OpenOffice.org infringes 45 of the patents it holds.
Steven D'Aprano is the operations manager of
Cybersource, one of Australia's longest running open source and
Linux-Windows integration firms. Like other open source advocates he
believes that the claim that FOSS (free and open source software)
infringes 235 Microsoft patents is nothing but bluster and an attempt
to sow the seeds of FUD.
While D'Aprano believes that Microsoft's claims against Linux are
destined to go the way of SCO, he finds the claims against
OpenOffice.org particularly interesting because the open source office
productivity suite is based on Sun Microsystem's StarOffice.
"If Microsoft goes after OpenOffice, which is the free open source
version, while ignoring Sun, that will be very interesting," says
D'Aprano. "You would imagine that if hypothetically there is a patent
violation in OpenOffice, it would also be in StarOffice.
"The first question I would be looking at then is Microsoft going to
sue Sun? If they don't, then it strongly suggests that they don't think
that their patent is valid. Sun has got dollars to fight it in court
and have it overturned."
Thus, we have a situation where Microsoft may have to explain why the
open source OpenOffice.org suite infringes upon its patents while Sun's
proprietary version, upon which it is based, does not.
D'Aprano believes that it will be almost impossible for Microsoft to
win a case based upon the similarity of appearance and function of
OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office.
"Microsoft should know that it is not easy to win a case on look and
feel issues because Apple tried to sue Microsoft when Windows came
out," says D'Aprano. "They tried to sue Microsoft on the charges that
they were copying the concepts of windows, icons, the trash can and all
the rest of that. So it's going to be very difficult for Microsoft to
argue that they've got exclusive access to the basic user interface
elements of windows, mouse, icons. There are similarities in some of
the menu items because there are certain standards that Microsoft did
not invent, such as the File and Edit menus."
In short, the unspoken challenge to Microsoft remains: if
OpenOffice.org infringes 45 Microsoft patents, how many patents does
Microsoft believe that Sun's StarOffice infringe?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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