10.23.18
Microsoft’s Patent Troll Intellectual Ventures Still Suing Microsoft’s Rivals, Microsoft Gags Its Staff Regarding Patent Matters
While Microsoft is trying to sell “Azure IP Advantage” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21], its ‘protection’ racket (defense from Microsoft’s trolls) and strategy for getting everyone — even GNU/Linux workloads — on Azure
Summary: Microsoft says it’s pursuing “truce”; the patent trolls it has created and backed (Bill Gates still backs them at a personal capacity) feel differently
Microsoft loves Microsoft. Microsoft loves Windows. Microsoft loves its patents. It also loves the patent trolls it created and invested in. Microsoft’s biggest patent troll Intellectual Ventures passes patents to another shell (distancing itself from it) and then attacks rivals of Microsoft (again, as usual).
“Large companies, and especially Microsoft, are arming and financing patent trolls to attack their competition.”“An IP Valuation Partners affiliate is asserting patents recently acquired from Intellectual Ventures against Facebook, Instagram, Snap and Foursquare Labs,” Scott Graham (The Recorder) wrote.
This happened while Microsoft wiped the media with its lies, e.g. “protecting Linux”, “open-sourcing patents”, knowing that anyone from Microsoft talking about it would only refute these lies. As it turns out, based on a new video from a former Microsoft employee, “Microsoft had told internally not to talk to the press about the OIN deal, and Microsoft is refraining to talk to journalists about this,” as Benjamin Henrion put it.
As a reminder, the situation is far more complicated than Microsoft put it (e.g. when telling lies to the press). Large companies, and especially Microsoft, are arming and financing patent trolls to attack their competition. It is a SCO-like tactic. Microsoft’s patent trolls do this constantly while Microsoft sells ‘protection’ from these trolls. It’s a classic protection racket and Microsoft euphemistically calls it “Advantage” (the same word it used to compel companies to only use Novell’s SUSE).
“Microsoft has not changed; only its outward strategy (PR) has changed.”“14 of the 25 patent suits filed Thursday were filed by patent trolls,” we learned yesterday, “according to RPX Corp. That’s 56%.”
Companies don’t sue directly — a fact that OIN would rather not be asked about (as it’s useless whenever that happens). The chief of OIN was himself working in the patent ‘monetisation’ business before he came to OIN. Need we remind readers that Microsoft has put Team Mono in charge of GitHub? Before Microsoft absorbed Team Mono in company form (Xamarin) Team Mono had strategically killed Free software projects that posed a threat to Microsoft/Windows. Microsoft has not changed; only its outward strategy (PR) has changed. It wants to get in. █
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist
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