“Microsoft has been a major proponent of software patents,
securing some 3,000 over the last 20 years but open source experts
now claim that far from profiting from the system, the software
maker may actually become a victim.“Speaking at the LinuxWorld conference in London on Wednesday,
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, said
that although Microsoft is seen as being very pro-patent at the
moment, if every other software maker enforced its patents in the
same way then Microsoft would find it very difficult and expensive
to do business…”