Ballmer steps-up Linux infringement suit rhetoric

Quoting:If it's a patent issue then they wont be able to do that. Copyright would be "You can't use this code, so you have to write it a different way." Patents are: "You can't have code that does this."

I'm concerned that they'll first establish Open Office as using VBA so it is popular, and then they'll bring litigation into it and you'll get a licensed version from Novell and a gimped version from everyone else. Home users might not care much, but businesses will go for the one called "Open Office Professional" or whatever other term they slap on it. And that will hurt the freedom and spirit of the Open Office project.

As to the inability to sue infringers of the patents, IANAL, but I suspect that it's possible to try. It is not Microsoft that has released the infringing code, but a separate company called Novell. The fact that Novell now has an agreement with Microsoft that they wont be sued for infringing on their patents, doesn't prevent Microsoft suing others. We here may be able to see what is morally wrong with Microsoft's behaviour, but it doesn't mean that a court will act accordingly. The fight alone will be damaging.

There's a side issue which is whether we want Open Office to support VBA? Obviously it fills a considerable need on the part of business which will make it far easier to migrate to Open Office in theory. However, the net result is to encourage VBA to be the default way of implementing macros in Open Office. After all, if you have the choice of your spreadsheet being compatible with both Excel and Calc, or Calc alone, isn't it more logical to make it compatible with both. But VBA is under Microsoft's control. No one else can expand it, modify it. And Microsoft products will always have the edge in implementation whilst Open Office will be the one with compatability problems and glitches. Basically, the interoperability in practice, could be one-sided enough that Open Office looks like a poor clone of MS Office. It isn't. In several ways it is more powerful, but when it plays on Mircosoft's turf, it looks bad. Novell may not see things this way, but then how many of Microsoft's previous partners are still around?

Reading this back, it comes across as anti-Microsoft paranoia, but everything here seems feasible to me and Microsoft is not run by idiots, but by highly intelligent people. And morality is certainly no restraint on the company's behaviour as we've seen countless times before. MS Office is critical to Microsoft's powerbase. Not merely because it's good and sells well, but because it's popularity helps them maintain a de facto file standard which is the biggest barrier to competitors establishing themselves. And perhaps more importantly, because if you need MS Office, you need MS Windows. If you're free of MS Office, then Linux becomes much more plausible for your company standard.

Open Office is a colossal threat to Microsoft. It can't be underestimated. And I think everything their new partners do and contribute has to be looked at a little more carefully. If any Novell engineer happens to be reading this, then I'm sorry but that now includes you and it certainly includes this VBA code in Open Office.

-Harmony.