Is Microsoft Offering Real Olive Branch to Open Source Community?

31 Mar

Posted by BSchwarz at 4:16 pm in Windows

Last week, Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith acknowledged that actions speak louder than words. But words are worthwhile too, he said.

A whole lot of words (not the promise of action, much less action itself) is what a skeptical crowd got at Smith’s speech, one of the keynotes at the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference.

Repeating a tune that Microsoft’s played a lot recently, Smith said his company wants to work with the open source community to find mutually beneficial solutions to intellectual property issues. But for the most part, he stuck to feel-good generalities, and when it came to specific complaints, Smith just repeated, “It’s a complicated issue.”

I don’t want to beat up on Smith — given the company and the setting, it would have been pretty surprising if he’d been more specific. But the audience didn’t seem too impressed with his comments, particularly when he was asked to reconcile his “let’s be friends” rhetoric with Microsoft’s allegations that the open source Linux operating system violates more than 200 of the company’s patents.

Read the rest at WRAL

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