Why Microsoft has chosen to go after Linux now

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 05:43

Opinion and Analysis

A couple of months back, at Australia's national Linux conference, a young Microsoft employee sat down with me and discussed ways in which Microsoft has contributed to open source.
In particular, we talked about Strawberry Perl , an open source implementation which gives Perl on Windows some very important functionality it has on other platforms - full compatibility with CPAN , the canonical location for Perl code and modules.

Microsoft's presence at the conference was in keeping with moves over the last two years or so, to try and have a conversation with the free and open software community as it seeks to find a way to make money off open source.

But if any Microsoft employee went to a free software or open source conference today, I doubt he or she would attract anything other than hostile glares. By suing GPS device maker TomTom over alleged violation of patents connected with an implementation of the Linux kernel any goodwill that Microsoft has built up has gone down the drain.

And there certainly was some goodwill. Andrew Tridgell, one of those who has fought long and hard for FOSS causes, told me that though Microsoft needed to be pulled into line when it misbehaved, but it was also necessary to acknowledge the company when it did something good.

Even a company like Red Hat, which has long been suspicious of Microsoft, was willing, a month or so back, to sign up to a deal that would commit it to work on interoperability.

And even though many people retained their suspicions of Microsoft, there were many open source companies willing to work towards interoperability.

Why did Microsoft decide to sue TomTom at this time? Is it the old arrogance asserting itself again as it has many times in the past? Is it a sense that suing at this time gives it more leeway than at others?

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