internetnews.com: Perens: New Patent-Suit Threats Poised to Strike

“SCO Group’s legal moves over Linux will fizzle, but the IT
world may soon feel a new chill in the form of patent lawsuits from
other vendors, open-source advocate Bruce Perens predicted
Wednesday.

“‘SCO is not the real threat,’ he said during the LinuxWorld
Expo here. In a limited-invite talk billed as an ‘Open Source State
of the Union,’ Perens, who currently serves as executive director
of the Desktop Linux Consortium, said Linux and open source are
increasingly threatened by software patents.

“That’s shorthand for Perens’ thesis that companies are building
up huge patent portfolios which they’ll use as legal bludgeons to
extract licensing fees, filing lawsuits if such fees aren’t
forthcoming. That’s what happened in a recent case involving
Microsoft, in which the software giant’s Internet Explorer browser
was found to have infringed on technology patented by the
University of California and Eolas Technology. (Microsoft was fined
$521 million. It is currently appealing the verdict…)”

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