Microsoft recently joined the Linux Foundation while still asserting its patents against the rest of the membership. As I found that odd, I tweeted some casually-calculated statistics about Microsoft’s patent revenues that seemed to me to simply be the aggregation of common knowledge. But maybe not – at least two respondents asked me to substantiate the figures. Having struck a nerve, this post is by way of explanation.
I, too, find it odd that Microsoft is now a ‘higher’ member of the Linux Foundation than, say, Red Hat, yet it still asserts its patents against various companies using Linux. It just doesn’t sit right.
I am amused by the flood of naive joy saluting this Microsoft move, as it makes them less evil. Yes, they are now a Linux Foundation “platinum” member… this means they are on equal footing with… Oracle! Case closed.
This article compares them with Red Hat, which supposedly don’t afford such level… but Red Hat are wiser and use their money to actually develop Linux (you know, RH is the single entity with the most contributions of code) with features who are useful for everyone (maybe except for SystemD :p ). With Microsoft is making sure Linux works under their (proprietary and commercial) infrastructure and PR.
Intel has a very similar level of contribution at this point, if not more than Red Hat.
If the case is closed, why hasn’t Linux gone down in flames the moment Oracle joined?
Probably because the real Linux development doesn’t happen at the Linux Foundation. They pay Linus, but he’s now more of a maintainer than a developer.
I don’t think you understand how Linux development works.
Because Oracle legal division is still busy dancing around the Solaris pyre. 😉
Except Oracle can do that because they outright own Solaris.
IIUC MS is mostly extracting patent money from Samsung & the likes making Android phones. Not “companies using Linux” overall. How much of the patents are even related to Linux kernel?
Some of the patent payments are also due to stupidity of the industry overall. E.g. instead of paying for FAT long file name support, just switch to non-encumbered format for chrissakes.
The FAT patents are invalid: https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ms-patent/
I think it’s naive to think that Microsoft is doing charity for Linux. As they have a man in the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation now, they (and their allies) have some power over the direction where Linux is piloted.
Which makes sense. Microsoft now have a vested interest in the platform.
They want Linux on Azure
SQL Server is now available for linux
Ubuntu for Windows
All this needs optimization and focus. It seems Microsoft are now willing to actually Pay for those improvements
It’s not the case here. With some exceptions, the Linux Foundation has no control over the development of Linux. They pay Linus’ salary, sure, but Linus does as he pleases. The Linux Foundation is more of a software politics kind of thing. Microsoft joining has zero negative impact, as far as I’m aware.
The foundation funds the kernal development, yes, but also other projects Node and cloudfoundry.org to name a couple.
By influencing where the money goes they can also influence the market they now (at least in part) depend upon
No, these are Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects
The Linux Foundation helps project organise themselves.
Edited 2016-11-25 09:17 UTC
And if they go where Linus and others want it then it will be, you know
FORKED
and we will get a new incarnation that moves forward whilst the other one… goes where exactly.
Yes, we will get MS-Linux V2017.
Perhaps this is their cunning plan… to fragment the Linux world even more than it is now.
My only question is, if this happens which side of the fence will Canonical be on?
They seem to be trying to make revenue from Ubuntu so perhaps the new MS Linux will make this possible?
Who knows eh?
Just watch this space.
Stay tooned for more exciting moves at Linux HQ.
{removes tongue from cheek}
A 500k annual fee to get platinum membership and a member on the board is peanuts for Microsoft and should be peanuts for RedHat or Intel as well. Apparently they just don’t want to pay up?
0.25% of 2bn would be 5 million, not 500k.
So to put that 500K in correct perspective, assuming the 2bn is correct: 500K is what Microsoft makes from patents every
2.19 hours! (while RedHat seems to take about 3 hours from everything they do)
Edited 2016-11-24 13:24 UTC
Hi,
For your $500K; do you get an extra donut at each monthly meeting that you wouldn’t get with other membership levels? Maybe Redhat just doesn’t want to pay $41.666K per donut.
– Brendan
Well, that donut allow MS to ask for something in the Kernel. Without Mayor Hesitation.
That money could help cover the engineering costs of integrating it to general strategy. The rest can serve to buy donuts and coffee for all the Team. Maybe a beer at the end of the day. [I don’t feel comfortable saying this
].
I don’t want to be picking nits, but the symbol to express ‘kilo’ (which means ‘a thousand’) is a lowercase -k, not an uppercase -K.
Maybe it’s because Americans are not very familiar with the SI system of units and prefixes, but that’s just how it is. When I see an uppercase -K without any unit that follows, I immediately think of the unit (of temperature) Kelvin. So when you say ‘my cpu has 512Kb L1 cache’ I think “What??? I didn’t know amounts of cache could be expressed in Kelvinbits!”
So there.
Edited 2016-11-25 13:14 UTC
I just used the capital K because the original post used it and I didn’t want to make it even more confusing. I think using 500K when talking about money is just the common (although technically, nitpickingly, incorrect) way both in Europe, the USA and most other places (but not Japan/China where they use 10^4, 10^8, etc)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#Similar_symbols_and_abbr…
So there
Honestly, this bothers me much less than the ambiguity between bytes and bits when people/tools don’t follow the B=bytes and b=bits convention given that bandwidth is often measured in both units.
Kilo-bytes versus kibi-bytes is confusing as well. I was comparing the file sizes across two systems and didn’t understand why they were different sizes until I discovered that “du” under busybox used a different value for “K” than “du” on ubuntu.
Edited 2016-11-25 16:51 UTC
Well then people in the seventies should have considered that the (lowercase) k for kilo was already officially reserved to mean 10^3 and had to find something else for 2^10.
Now that we have found something else (the Kilo-binary, or kibi in short with Ki as the unit), people should start bloody well using it to stop all the confusion! I really hate that a lot of OSs and tools still use the wrong meaning and/or notation. An uppercase K without the -i isn’t a meaningful prefix and I only recognise SI-prefixes when dealing with quantities!
So for historical reasons, I sort of understand why they wrote 350KB instead of 350KiB or 358.4kB, but this does not at all apply to situations concerning sums of money. Or maybe it does in Northern America, but it doesn’t anywhere else, that’s for sure.
Edited 2016-11-25 18:29 UTC
A lot of Linux fans seemingly ‘hate’ RedHat because they make money from ‘free’ stuff.
Personally, I think that not being at the top level is a smart move by RH. This means they can’t be accused of trying to shape the direction of Linux ‘the RH direction.
It remains to be seen what MS tries to do with their new found position.
Personally, I’d be watching them like a hawk.
Is The World’s Biggest Effort to make computing better for all. Wouldn’t Like to polarize the issue on franchising|taxing|patenting.
Will take a look at it where all parts at stake are over an Open Platform.
Small Actors and Individuals could School within That Consortium protected from internal demands.
Que?
A and B are in the same town but B still goes to the police when A steals things from him.
Why _wouldn’t_ MS use their patents against those that violate them? It doesn’t make sense.
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