“Although the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, Microsoft indicated that it is being compensated by Salesforce.com based on the strength of Microsoft’s leading patent portfolio in the areas of operating systems, cloud services and customer relationship management software. ”

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/aug10/08-04sfcpr.mspx

Then there’s amazon deal which is clearly against Red Hat…

I think that lawsuit (against Microsoft) for slandering title or tortious interference would be good move to make ‘em talk or shut up forever. But Red Hat is reluctant to do that…

EU lobbying wouldn’t help either, because Europe can’t police against patent bullying in the US.

Press release also mentions “OS patents” and Salesforce uses RHEL.

The way the PR was phrased (with context) makes it just a remote possibility that Red Hat was the target. I had a long discussion with Müller over this (he insisted that Linux was impacted).

As this madness goes on, I am more and more in favor of ideas like open source patent trolling companies. Accumulate patents and go after proprietary companies, until they become advocates for abolishing patents. Only way to convince them that patents are evil is to use patent to do evil to them.

There is no better defense than obvious offense. In fact, GPL was born as hack on copyright law, when Stallman realized that companies are going to copyright everything.

I think DPL patent pool is nice idea of patent copyleft.