“It was just over a year ago that Microsoft Corp. dropped a
bombshell of a claim: users of Linux and open-source software were
unwittingly violating as many as 235 Microsoft software
patents.“‘This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing
infringement,’ Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice-president of
intellectual property and licensing, told Fortune magazine at the
time. ‘There is an overwhelming number of patents being
infringed.’“Since then, critics say Microsoft has played the ‘good cop, bad
cop’ routine with the open-source camp…”