A Question for the armchair lawyers
- Shane Coyle
- 2006-11-16 19:42:31 UTC
- Modified: 2006-12-10 06:44:25 UTC
IANAL, AFAIK, so I pose this query to the community (and passers by):
With MS moving aggressively to make deals with all Linux vendors to recoup royalties on the distribution of Open Source Software (its main competition), is there any type of antitrust concern?
If MS is allowing these puppet competitors to exist just to allay antitrust concerns, while actually earning revenue from their supposed 'competition', how is this not monopolistic?
My high school civics makes me recall something about horizontal monopolies, is this the beginning of one?
Such a monopoly is known as a horizontal monopoly. A magazine publishing firm, for example, might publish many different magazines on many different subjects, but it would still be considered to engage in monopolistic practices if the intent of doing this was to control the entire magazine-reader market, and prevent the emergence of competitors. (Wikipedia)
Comments
tz
2006-11-18 23:26:19
So when Ballmer goes off and says Linux is violating Microsoft's patents, it might hit the three provisions for libel: (Wikipedia) There was a false or misleading statement made, the statement was used in commercial advertising or promotion, and the statement creates a likelihood of harm to the plaintiff.
If Microsoft has patents covering Linux they should show them. If not they are breaking the law as all Distros other than SUSE are harmed.
But IANAL, and this seems to be subtle.
If the statement Ballmer made is true, it might take suing them for them to specify which patents where GNU/Linux violates. (I use GNU/Linux to include all the FOSS code beyond the kernel).