San Francisco - Microsofts aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than "a marketing thing," according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.
"They have been sued for patents by other people, but I dont think theyve -- not that Ive gone through any huge amount of law cases -- but I dont think theyve generally used patents as a weapon," Torvalds said. "But theyre perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, Hey, isnt this convenient? We can use this as a PR force."
Torvalds made the comments during the second half of an interview conducted by the Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin on Oct. 16. The foundation is expected to make the rest of the interview publicly available on its Web site Monday. The foundation released the initial portion of the interview in January.
"Another reason why I dont think Microsoft really seriously would go after patents is when youre a convicted monopolist in the marketplace you really should not be suing your competitors over patents," Torvalds continued. "I think that most Microsoft lawyers would say, You know, lets not do that; that sounds insane."
Microsofts recent work around improving its platforms interoperability with Linux left Torvalds largely unmoved.
"I think there are people inside Microsoft who really want to improve interoperability and I also think there are people inside Microsoft who would much rather just try to stab their competition in the back," he said. "I think the latter class of people have usually been the one[s] who won out in the end, but -- so I wouldnt exactly trust them."
Microsoft spokespeople on Friday declined to comment on Torvalds remarks. The company has said it believes that Linux infringes on its intellectual property, although it has been criticized for not being more precise with its allegations.
Torvalds is instead focused on improving Linux, he said. "I work weekdays, I work weekends, I work 52 weeks a year. I dont want there to be any question of whos the best maintainer," he said. "And at the same time, I actually also do want to encourage competition. ... So, I actually enjoy seeing all these other kernel trees happening. All the vendors have their own."
However, the Linux kernel community overall could be more welcoming to new ideas, he suggested. "One of the problems is we have people who have such high criteria for what is acceptable or not that it scares away people who want to do new code and do new experiments," he said. "We mustnt set the bar that high. New code, new drivers, there will be problems and Id rather take them and then improve them."
Even as Linux matures as a technology, it has yet to make a major impact in the mainstream desktop market. "Its really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows ... Theres just this huge inertia in that market," he said.
In contrast, he said, it was much easier to sell Linux in the context of a server: "Theres just a few loads, theyre fairly simple, theyre fairly well-understood, people have much less inertia in upgrading a server than they have in upgrading their desktop."
At one point, the discussion turned to Suns work to create an open-source community around Open Solaris. Torvalds expressed deep skepticism toward the effort.
"Its generally hard to build a community around a commercial entity that also wants to be in control because everybody else around that commercial entity will always feel like theyre at the mercy of Sun," he said.
This dynamic is reflected in Open Office, "where the fact that Sun wants to have copyright assignments and exclusive control over the license ends up being something that actually drives away some developers," he argued.
Overall, Torvalds expressed ambivalence toward Sun, which recently has developed an image as a particularly open-source-friendly company. "In many ways, Sun has done a lot of things right. At the same time, they seem to often have trouble going the full last step," he said.
Ian Murdoch, vice president of Suns Connected Developer group, defended Suns commitment to the open-source model. "An open-source project has to have coordination, its not anarchy," said Murdoch, who earlier in his career founded the Debian version of Linux.
"If you look at the Linux kernel itself, Linus is firmly in control of that, and the only difference is hes an individual and Sun is a company. ... Some of the most successful open-source projects are being driven by companies, like MySQL for example," he said.
Torvalds also pulled out his crystal ball, offering predictions on how technology will change in the next five years.
While hardware will be "hugely better," softwares power and complexity will grow alongside it, he said. "I suspect things will be about the same speed because the software will have grown and youll have more bling to just slow the hardware down."
Virtualization is "not that big of a deal," according to Torvalds. "Its been all around for decades and its very interesting in niche markets -- I think the people who expected to change things radically are just fooling themselves."
Real change will come from entirely new uses of computers, he predicted.
(James Niccolai in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
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