Understandably, there’s been a lot of hand wringing about this. But the experts and evidence all suggest that Microsoft is all bark and no bite in this particular case.
Tag: Microsoft-Corporation
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Even Microsoft Disagrees with Blackboard
I recently noted that, contrary to Blackboard General Counsel Matthew Small’s assertion that no patent holder can say for certain what they will or will not do with a patent, IBM has done exactly that by providing royalty-free licenses to linux on hundreds of their patents. But hey, that’s IBM. They’re into all that crazy hippy Open Source linux stuff. Surely a normal software company wouldn’t do that…right?
If IBM is too radical for you, then let’s look at Microsoft. Surprise, surprise, even that bastion of voracious techno-capitalism has announced that they promise–promise!!–not to assert patents that they hold on web services against anyone. And once again, that promise comes in the form of a legally binding license.
The next time any of you has the opportunity to speak with Matt Small, ask him why Blackboard is unwilling to do what all of the software industry leaders are doing with increasing frequency. Ask him why Blackboard will not provide a royalty-free license to whomever they claim that they will not sue. If you are a Blackboard customer, ask him why he won’t offer you a royalty free license to indemnify you. He clearly can. His only other truthful answer would be that it would reduce the value of the patent for him to do so. Because, you know, somebody someday may buy the patent from Blackboard, and if that somebody can’t sue you with it then Blackboard will get less money from the sale.
Nice, huh?
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Microsoft Takes the Lead on Openness (?!)
Microsoft recently announced that they are making the issue register (i.e., bug tracker) for Internet Explorer public. Yes, there are a few hoops you need to jump through in order to see it, but basically anyone can now see the open bugs around IE. This is a big deal. As Washington Post technology security columnist Brian Krebs has pointed out, Microsoft takes an average of 46 days to patch critical security vulnerabilities (and 135 days for bug fixes in general) while Mozilla takes an average of 23 days to patch similar flaws, with a third of them patched in under 10 days. (There are some caveats to these numbers noted in the articles, but the basic gap is pretty soundly documented.) A recent study [PDF] from Carnegie Mellon found that Open Source projects typically patch security vulnerabilities 60% faster than proprietary vendors. I don’t have the data to prove that this applies to other kinds of bugs as well but it seems logical to infer that it would.
LMS vendors should take note of this data and of Microsoft’s leadership in opening up their database of open issues.