oh baruther...

hopefully this will lead to the software patent laws being burned down, not the *bridge*.

how swell would that be? the end of software patents/licensing and the beginning of a battle over who makes the best hardware, which title already goes to Apple!

=
w

All your FUD are belong to us. This "disclosure" by MS isn't targetted for people in "the know". They've been releasing quite a few news releases in the past few days, about how much Vista is selling (to OEMs) and how they're targetting their "competitor" Linux. It all stinks of stock price boost (which has been flat in recent months) as well as the fight for OOXML (aka big blob binary in XML format) vs ODF.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=MSFT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDocument_and_Office_Open_...

All this really sounds to me like a bully in the realization that its model is failing. I think in the next few years we'll start slowly seeing a changing of the guard, which I think is going to be great. I hope we can evolve to a time where there is no clear cut monopoly on the OS and desktop, we'll start seeing more and more real innovation and less and less restrictions on what we can do with our content, our hardware, and our software (I mean even stuff that we should choose to write, not necessarily stuff we license).

MS won't sue: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62014865,00.htm