Three Distributors reject Microsoft Agreement

Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandriva have all rejected patent agreements with Microsoft. Microsoft has not been able to publicly identify any infringing patents, leading many observers to compare their strategy to that of SCO who also used unspecified intellectual property infringement claims that later proved to be baseless. Microsoft did however offer incentive to distributors such as Novell in a deal that will see Novell on the receiving end of substantial patent royalties.

Red Hat director of corporate communications Leigh Day says "We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency." Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's CEO and supporter of Ubuntu Linux said in a blog posting on Saturday "Allegations of 'infringement of unspecified patents' carry no weight whatsoever. We don't think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together,". Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Paris-based Mandriva, said, "We don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job, or to pay protection money to anyone."

Microsoft New Zealand has been asked by the NZOSS to identify any patents that may be at issue. Microsoft New Zealand refused to do so, claiming that it was up to the developers to review tens of thousands of patents to ensure non infringement when writing software. This suggestion is presumably also applicable to all commercial software developers in New Zealand.