i4i vs Microsoft

[btiffin]

So,

i4i wins. MS is told to quit selling Word (or get a workaround) by Jan 11, 2010.

Is this a good thing? (And I frame that question from my personal point of view of pro open and GPL)

Will it

a) cause MS to get sick and tired of patent law and quit using courts to threaten GNU/Linux
b) cause MS to get angry and act out as a shot and cornered bear?
c) have little effect on MS's attitude and actions

and

a) give business owners a chance to learn about Open Office and other big fat freebies?
b) not effect business IT decisions as the world is it what it is...

Curious cheers

[DtY]

Is this about the patent Microsoft using patented XML parsing thing?

Microsoft will probably just drop the features that use it, if they don't have a workaround by the time they're supposed to (we'll know this is the case if Office '10 is released in January!).

As much as I dislike Microsoft, I don't care for patents either, so I'm going to have to take Microsoft's side on this.

I doubt this is going to really affect anything in the long run. Remember Sony's virus? That lasted what, two months before everyone forgot about it?

[Barbarrosa]

Pardon me for thinking c) & b) are the case.

I really don't like a lot of things about Microsoft, but it can take a lot more than this.

I don't think this event will itself be a great catalyst for change to OSS or GNU/GPL software in businesses. Anything that does such will be very gradual, and the closed nature of software is tightly bound to copyright/patent law. If that changes to favor open source, then I would agree with a) or b), and a), respectively.

In this matter, I wish the world was more socialist... but it's capitalist and fascist, so we have to play along until we can get our way. The Internet's helping, but we're not quite there yet.

We need institutions that serve everyone, and pay programmers to make nice things. Capitalism gets us close, but we're not there yet.

[wtd]

Microsoft is likely to simply end up writing a big fat cheque to i4i at the last minute, resulting in the injunction being lifted (or not enforced).

[syntax_error]

To be frank, I don't see much of the above happening, as far as I've read in Engadget the new office 2010 doesn't use this patent so it will not hurt them in the larger sense.

[btiffin]

Read about the patch Microsoft announced today, so ya, pretty sure this issue is already over.

Thanks for the opinions gentlemen.

Cheers