Microsoft says GNU/Linux violates 235+ Windows patents

The Microsoft position is this: even if you don't use Windows, you still have to pay them as much money as they would have gotten for selling you a copy of it.

The free world appears to be uncowed by Microsoft's claims. Its master legal strategist is Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, which counsels FOSS projects on how to protect themselves from patent aggression. (He's also a professor on leave from Columbia Law School, where he teaches cyberlaw and the history of political economy.)

Moglen contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable. (The Supreme Court has never expressly ruled on the question.) In any case, the fact that Microsoft might possess many relevant patents doesn't impress him. "Numbers aren't where the action is," he says. "The action is in very tight qualitative analysis of individual situations." Patents can be invalidated in court on numerous grounds, he observes. Others can easily be "invented around." Still others might be valid, yet not infringed under the particular circumstances...

If push comes to shove, would Microsoft sue its customers for royalties, the way the record industry has?

"That's not a bridge we've crossed," says CEO Ballmer, "and not a bridge I want to cross today on the phone with you."