Everyone's abuzz with the
Microsoft-Novell deal. (Groklaw coverage
1 2 3 and surely more to come; you can also pick it up on Slashdot or anywhere else.) It's a trap! They're coming! Ack, they're using patents, run for the trees!
So what's the big deal? Microsoft's strongest suit has always been marketing and FUD, rather than technology. This isn't an unexpected development by any stretch of the imagination. The only thing which might be surprising about it is the Novell side of the affair. And I always did think there was something weird about Novell, with their support of mono. Anyway, unless you're a Novell customer who now feels he has to switch, you probably don't really care what Novell do or don't do.
Microsoft usually lose out to Linux and free software in general in any kind of purely technological comparison. That's not going to change, Novel or no Novel. So I see this as an incremental step, not a completely new angle of attack. The patent threats aren't new either. If Microsoft stop fearing a European reprisal at some point, they'll probably start suing people on those grounds. Sort of like a combination of SCO-style protracted lawsuit-without-evidence and RIAA mass lawsuit. Then it will be time for the big companies like Sun and IBM, which have pledged their support in one way or another, to step in. But none of that is new.
The real danger will be when Microsoft stops even pretending they can sell anything someone would want to buy, and go all-out on the lawsuits. I don't think we've really seen what they're capable of when they're desperate. But until then it's just FUD as usual. If MS takes over SCO's role in threatening to sue Linux users... Well, I hope they'll fail the same way SCO did, even if they make a much bigger splash at first. The real danger along those lines is that software patents might spread to other countries.
While I don't usually like to predict the future, I do believe Microsoft's monopoly will fall during the next decade in most places. (Of course, it doesn't really exist in most parts of the world to begin with, and neither does the PC/Internet revolution.) That doesn't mean there won't be a Microsoft or that people won't be using its software. But it won't be a powerful monopoly anymore. In other words, people will have a real choice because data and services will be OS- and app-agnostic.
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