Ballmer fires off Linux patent warning shot

Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open source vendors they must respect his company's intellectual property.

In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open source world".

The cross-selling partnership means Microsoft will recommend Suse Linux for customers who want a mixed Microsoft/open source environment. It also involves a "patent co-operation agreement", under which Microsoft and Novell agreed not to sue each other's customers for patent infringement.

In a clear threat against open source users, Ballmer repeated his earlier assertions that open source "is not free", referring to the possibility that Microsoft may sue Linux vendors. Microsoft has suggested Linux software infringes some of its intellectual property but has never named the patents in question.

Ballmer said: "I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free, and open source will have to respect the intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will."

He added: "But I don't want to eliminate in your minds the notions of risk of pricing that comes from competition with open source. We are higher priced but we bring greater value."

Alongside the renewed threat over IP, Ballmer was also bullish about winning large corporate accounts against Linux vendors. "We have done very well versus Linux on the desktop and on the server, and I am hopeful that we will build share, particularly in web servers and high-performance clusters, from Linux in the next year," he told analysts.

But Red Hat's chief executive is not impressed. Addressing a Merrill Lynch conference at the start of this week, Matthew Szulik urged his customers to use up their open source tokens from the Microsoft/Novell partnership. These coupons entitle them to support and maintenance for Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Szulik said: "We certainly expect that there will be those cases where customers will consume those coupons. We're certainly encouraging one or two customers to consume all of them: let's get this over with."

As of January, Microsoft had already sold 35,000 open source coupons out of the 70,000 it has committed to make available each year as part of the five year-partnership.

AIG Technologies, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are among those to take advantage of the Microsoft/Novell collaboration to roll out a mixed proprietary/open source infrastructure.

Richard Thurston writes for ZDNet UK