does microsoft pay royalties to xerox as well?

of using and relying upon Linux on servers and desktops. MS does

not -have- to win in court. It never has to -go- to court. It mearly has

to make the conservative business crowd nervous.  That way they’ll

“play it safe” by sticking with MS servers and Vista on the desktops.

As for Ma and Pa consumer, 90% of them will use Windows anyway

because it came “free” with their computer. Besides, they can’t figure

out how to use anything else and all their friends use Windows too.

SUSE ? (K)Ubuntu ? Fedora ??? Alien words.  Probably communist …

Who are you talking to?  And other than demonstrating that you’re a moron, what precisely is your point?

First of all, nobody, and I say nobody, wants to see M$ playing the ‘big baby’ here. If each and every person in the US (or any other country for that matter) would patent every part of his and her full name, wouldn’t it be a little bit absurd? Or any person that can read a dictionary picks up a random word and submit it for patenting? (The patent office wouldn’t even agree on these anyway.)

Its like any monolithic, capitalist company pick any animal/plant/object from nature and get a patent for it? That’s insanity. Nobody can patent the air we breathe, the water we breathe, the food we eat, and even the words we write. That even goes for the words found in the source codes that every developer, hacker, programmer, engineer and architect in this world would write to make the very fabric of this ’software culture’.
 

They benefited from lack of patents/copyrights, but they want to ensure no one else does.

Where to begin?

Point 1, if Linux “blows”, we would not be having this discussion because no one would be using it.

Point 2, if Windows didn’t suck, there would be no impetus to use something else.

Point 3, desktop concept can’t be owned by Microsoft, if anything it would be Apple’s and, if it was, there is no chance that Jobs would let that slip even though his OS is BSD at it’s core.

Point 4, CDE has been using contextual menus for 20 years on UNIX.

Point 5, Microsoft winning here is a bad thing for everyone, even you stupid M$ fanboys.  The problem is that they own so much of the market that they don’t really innovate anymore.  Zune is a copy of iPod, Live Network is a copy of a myriad of other things that closely resemble the Google offering, MSN was their attempt to copy AOL, which was a copy of Prodigy.  I can’t think of one new offering from the boys at Microsoft that they’ve developed.  For the most part they have purchased anything that was good and crushed that square peg into the round hole they made for it.  Hotmail, for example, was great before M$ bought it and crammed Passport into it.

Last point…

Microsoft < (IBM+Sony+Novell+fossCommunity);

while(openSourceAlternative.isAvailable){

  smallBusiness++;

  taxDollars+=taxRate*smallBusiness.getProfit();

}

Renee, you’re an effing moron and a liar.  I have my name on patents — do you? Even 2 minutes on google would make it clear that you’re wrong.

“Why do you assume we are ignorant?”

 Tomasz, you’re an effing moron.  I didn’t *assume* anything — you made it clear that you’re ignorant with your words.

 
“We do not have absurd software patents, because we fought for it when lobbyists financed (mostly) by american corporations tried to enforce them (inter alia by corrupting the European Commision)…”

 
In other words, you’re a liar — you *do* care about software patents.