Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Microsoft is not the real threat

Much has been written about Microsoft’s allegation of patent infringements in Linux (by which I’m sure they mean GNU/Linux ). I don’t think Microsoft is the real threat, and in fact, I think Microsoft and the Linux community will actually end up fighting on the same side of this issue.

I’m in favour of patents in general, but not software or business method patents. I’ll blog separately some day about why that’s the case, but for the moment I’ll just state for the record my view that software patents hinder, rather than help, innovation in the software industry.

Beyond knowing he is behind the Ubuntu distribution I didn’t know much about Mark Shuttleworth but I’m very impressed by this article, not least because it is one of the most reasoned approaches to co-existing with Microsoft I have read in a long time.

Sadly, I still worry that the only people who will benefit from a patent war will be the lawyers. Still given the cold war analagies flying about over Mutually Assured Destruction patent policies, at least someone will compared to nuclear war….