“What was Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, thinking? Amazon just signed a patent cross-licensing deal that pays Microsoft intellectual property fees for, among other things, patents that cover Amazon’s Linux-based Kindle e-reader and its Linux servers. Too bad Microsoft has never, ever been able to show that its patents cover anything to do with Linux.

Microsoft claims that Linux and other open-source programs violate its patent rights. They’ve been making those claims for years. What’s always been missing is proof.

Microsoft’s biggest lie, first made by Steve Ballmer back in 2004, is that Linux violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. There’s one little problem with this assertion which has underlaid every Microsoft attack on Linux’s intellectual property since then: it’s not true.

As Dan Ravicher, the author of the OSRM (Open Source Risk Management) study that Microsoft bases all its claims on, told me at the time that “Microsoft is up to its usual FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt].” Ravicher, a patent attorney and executive director of PUBPAT (Public Patent Foundation) added, “Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.”" blogs.computerworld.com