Who Banged the Drum First?
The recent uproar in the open source community about Microsoft’s claims, though, ignores an important chapter in the community’s history, Laura DiDio, research fellow with Yankee Group, told LinuxInsider. “Some of the stuff coming out of the open source community about Microsoft and the patent infringement issues is very disingenuous,” she asserted. “Four years ago, the people banging the drum about patent infringement were in the open source community.” Back in 2004, said DiDio, then-fledging insurance firm Open Source Risk Management commissioned a study to determine just how many patents Linux may infringe upon. At that time, the number was pinned at 280 or so, most of them owned by IBM (NYSE: IBM), with about 30 held by Microsoft. The now-infamous study was conducted by Pamela Jones of Groklaw, according to DiDio, and its methods and conflicts have drawn much comment since then. Still, the open source community itself was the first to raise the issue of how much Linux actually over
