A little over a month ago, Paul Graham stirred up a little hornet’s nest with his essay “Microsoft is Dead”. As he found it necessary to clarify a couple of days later, Paul didn’t mean to suggest that Microsoft was on the verge of going out of business. He meant that, in terms of all the progressive and exciting things going on in software development today, Microsoft is largely irrelevant. They continue to bolt on new features to Windows and Office in a desperate attempt to keep up with the competition, but it’s been a long time since anyone other than Microsoft’s marketing department considered them “innovative”.

Given this reality, today’s news that Microsoft is demanding royalty payments, for what it claims are over 200 patent violations by a number of open source projects (including Linux and Open Office), should come as no surprise. Although it’s not quite the same circumstances, I can’t help but compare this to the embarrassing efforts by the SCO Group over the past four years to claim intellectual property rights to parts of the Linux kernel (while their plummeting stock price continually threatens to get them delisted by Nasdaq). As Charles Nutter put it, “I’d hate to be an OSS (Open Source Software) developer or apologist [working] at Microsoft today.”