There has been no shortage of great writing on Microsoft’s patent strategy announced by Steve Ballmer on Monday. It’s a little hard to find, but it’s there. An interesting comment I found today (emphasis mine):
MY CHALLENGE TO MICROSOFT is that, if you’re just enforcing the law, go ahead and sue all your closest partners first. Start with Mainsoft, then find a list of all your gold partners and just work your way down. Maybe look up all the MVPs and find out who they work for, and make sure their companies get hit as well.
Also, find all the startups you’ve purchased over the years (e.g. Hotmail) and find the original owners and sue them retroactively. I don’t know if that’s possible to sue the Hotmail founder for using linux way back–but if it can be done, it SHOULD BE.
After that’s all cleared up, then you can go after the rest of the industry, like IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Oracle, etc. Fair’s fair, after all.
Posted by Peter {faa780ce-0f0a-4c28-81d2-3667b71287fd} on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 to the Joel On Software forum