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You can almost hear the Disney witch-cackles and see the wicked rubbing together of hands as this insight developed into a strategy.
Given the eroding credibility of the DOJ these days, it’s hard to tell whether this should instill as much confidence in Micro$oft as it seems to.
Microsoft Finds Legal Defender in Justice Dept. - New York Times
It might seem a little bit of a stretch to equate the open source community’s struggle against Microsoft with a bloody Kentucky coal miners’ strike, but the tactics used by Duke Power and the Eastover Mining Company in 1974 to prevent workers at the Brookside Mine from joining the United Mine Workers of America have something in common with the divide and conquer tactics Microsoft is using to maintain its market dominance.
This isn’t hyperbole, it’s the way big companies and governments have managed to control human beings (and manipulate the marketplace) as long as there have been corporations and kingdoms.
No, Microsoft hasn’t resorted to violence to protect their bottom line, but sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt, and coercing companies to take sides by signing patent agreements is only the most recent version of a classic power play used effectively for generations.
For some real insight into how divide and conquer strategies work, and how they can be overcome, it’s worth watching Barbara Koppel’s Academy Award Winning 1976 documentary, Harlan County, USA. The movie shows how a large corporation uses money and fear to exploit divisions in a community and isolate those who oppose it. Local government and law enforcement is co-opted, racial and religious divisions are exploited, and the end result is a community at war with itself that is too fragmented (and exhausted) to stand up to the company.
The only way to fight the power is through solidarity, something that wears thin when individual liberty and livliehoods are constantly threatened.
Harlan County, USA tells this timeless story in stark terms, and it’s hard to watch it without noticing how unchecked corporate power has an almost reflexive aversion to anything collective. It comes from a faulty binary mindset: on/off, good/evil, male/female, black/white, etc. If it improves pay and conditions for workers, then it must hurt profits and shareholders. What’s good for the many must be bad for the few. Through that lens, it’s easy to understand why Microsoft sees the open source community as such a threat- it’s just in the nature of things.
But fortunately, it’s also in human nature to pull together and resist.
In a brazen attempt to undermine Microsoft’s recent patent infringement sabre-rattling (and perhaps to call attention to an ambitious open source documentary project) a shadowy (compliment) outfit called Digital Tipping Point has started a Sue Me First, Microsoft wiki for open source users to line up for a chorus of bluff-calling.
As of today at 9:45 AM, EDT, the Sue Me First, Microsoft wiki had 906 signatories supposedly just itching for some hot patent litigation
DTP’s Christian Einfeldt says on the wiki “We are asking that people include their name, email address, version of GNU Linux disto(s) being used, and a short statement explaining why you are using that distro.” and adds that although he is a lawyer, he is no way offering legal advice and does not practice patent law.
Some of the comments people are leaving attached to their names are pretty funny.
Digital Tipping Point also has a nice collection of over 400 short films and videos about the free and open source software movement available at the Internet Archive.
There’s a lot happening on the M$ patent front. Here is a quick roundup.
Two from InformationWeek:
Three Scenarios For How Microsoft’s Open Source Threat Could End — Microsoft Takes On Open Source
CEO Of Open-Source Software Vendor SugarCRM Speaks Out
From Computerworld UK:
An interesting spin from the Open Source Industry Austrailia (OSIA)
Microsoft Admits Patent Weakness
Open Source Industry Australia Limited (OSIA) welcomes this week’s admission by Microsoft in magazine articles, including Fortune magazine, that the atents it has identified against open source are liable to be struck out as invalid.
Eben Moglen offers up this tidbit via the Seattle Post Intelligencer.
Free Software lawyer discusses Microsoft patent claims
Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation, discussed the details of the draft General Public License Version 3 — including its defenses against the Microsoft-Novell deal —
And Groklaw, of course, is all over it.
Moglen: SUSE Vouchers Have No Expiration Date! (Unlike MS’s Patent Bullying)
Moglens slides and notes regrading Suse Vouchers.
This story is evolving quickly. Check back for updates as the patent war escalates or unravels, whichever happens first.
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