Microsoft and Their Legal Battles With Free and Open Source

Microsoft and Their Legal Battles with Free and Open Source (FOSS)

Microsoft has always vigorously protected its patents and sought out legal defense against competing technologies and businesses that threatened its core business model. In 2006, Microsoft mounted a comprehensive and well-orchestrated attack on open software, alleging that 235 of their core patents had been infringed on and they were due damages from Novell and several other publishers of open source operating systems. Microsoft believed they would have a quick and decisive victory over the Free and Open Source (FOSS) community, establishing a very defensible legal precedent and being able to create a long-term barrier to their impact on the Microsoft business model (McGhee, 2007). This did not occur however, and at the close of 2006, Microsoft and Novell brokered an agreement that saved each millions of dollars in legal fees. What Microsoft had meant as an inhibitor to the market actually turned into a strong catalyst of growth for the FOSS community. Developers and distributors of FOSS operating systems and applications rallied around the decision and sought to make their standard pervasive throughout corporate America (Miller, Voas, Costello, 2010). FOSS, which had initially been viewed as not as secure or reliable as Microsoft proprietary software, chose as an industry to concentrate on the key criterion that corporate purchasers cared most about. This included heavy investments in auditability, security, stability and fault tolerance, in addition to application scalability (McGhee, 2007). This strategy worked and led to the development of FOSS as the new standard in many enterprises.

Analyzing the Proliferation of FOSS

When Microsoft began its legal assault on FOSS many industry and financial analysts predicted its demise and eventual re-licensing under the Microsoft brand (McGhee, 2007). Ironically the FOSS community took this as a call to action and invested heavily in security, scalability and stability, and as a result operating systems based on this standard dominate enterprise Web servers for website hosting and blogging incouding the Facebook and Wordpress platforms (Miller, Voas, Costello, 2010). The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which is a key determinant of economic value gained from IT investments, is heavily favoring FOSS today given the complex, costly and often confusing models that Microsoft uses to price their products (Miller, Voas, Costello, 2010). FOSS is winning because they made a superior server operating system while drastically reducing the complexity of licensing, in addition to creating a stable platform to operating enterprises on (Wormser, 2010).