Al Qaeda Now Based In Redmond

I’ll bet you never knew that such a thing as “GNU Telephony” existed, did you? What a wonderful thing it might be: call-forwarding, direct from the command line; ConfigureMakeMakeCall; and so on.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as useful as that. (As useful as that?) It’s yet another fifth column for whining about things that Freetards don’t understand, in this case patents.

What I think people fail to appreciate is that Microsoft does not seek the elimination of software patents but only to further limit the possibility of suffering spectacular losses at the end of such cases.

Brilliant, isn’t it? Most paranoid conspiracy theorists can at least stick to the Holy Text, which in this case would be “Microsoft is Evil and Hoards Patents.” In a spectacular inversion of this perceived truth, we are suddenly told that it’s generally believed that a core Microsoft philosophy is the total elimination of patents.

Excuse me, I just had a Linda Blair moment. I’ve got my head on the right way round now. I’ll scrape the green slime off the wallpaper later.

OK, so that Illegal Monopoly war-chest of patents that Microsoft holds isn’t the problem. They’re still evil, obviously, because … well, they’re still evil, obviously. And, like Sauron facing the wrong way, they need to worry about the extreme cost of protecting themselves against patent liability. And why would this be?

Being a failed software company that can neither produce nor enter markets they are unable to illegally force people to buy their defective products, they clearly see future growth by taxing everyone else’s success.

I guess the poor souls will just have to continue legally accepting hundreds of millions of dollars from grateful customers who, for spurious reasons of profitability, customer satisfaction, and even the odd bit of software that doesn’t actually fail (we in the trade call it “doing an Xserver”), are prepared to put up with the fact that Microsoft is about to be hit with a shit-storm of patent litigation. Time to get out the AK47s, hacksaws, and holy books, lads!

Terrible shame about that failed illegality and non-existent market penetration and not having the success that Linux will inevitably bring. (Oops: GNU/Linux/Telephony … gotta get my terms right.) Sooner or later. Maybe five years from now, patent pending?