Over at Information Week, Paul McDougall has a piece that lays out some (but curiously not all) of the facts concerning the close ties between Acacia Research, who is now suing Red Hat and Novell, and Microsoft. He starts quite directly:
Less than two weeks after it hired a senior intellectual-property executive from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), a California-based firm has filed a patent-infringement suit against Red Hat and Novell (NSDQ: NOVL), distributors of open-source software that Microsoft has long claimed violates its patents.
and further reminds us that Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, just last week said:
“I expect they would like to go to the open source world as well,” Ballmer said while speaking at a Microsoft event in the U.K. Microsoft claims Linux and other open source programs violate more than 200 of its patents.
