Microsoft 2006 Research Paper

Microsoft and their Battle with FOSS

Microsoft and Their Legal Battles with Free and Open Source (FOSS)

In 2006, Microsoft mounted a major offensive against open source software providers, claiming copyright infringement of 235 different patents. Later in the year, Microsoft entered into an agreement with Novell to ensure both would avert costly litigation over open source patents. Microsoft believed that they would quickly attain legal victory over the Free and Open Source (FOSS) patents given the depth and breadth of legal talent and precedents they had in their favor (McGhee, 2007). In reality this litigation only served to galvanize the open source community, creating a powerful catalyst for competing against Microsoft and what many viewed as monopolistic behavior (Miller, Voas, Costello, 2010).

The key questions surrounding the exponential growth of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platform is explored in this analysis.Why FOSS Continues To Proliferate

There were many industry analysts and industry experts that predicted the demise of FOSS, most likely due to the legal teams of Microsoft and their patent expertise (McGhee, 2007). FOSS survived however and is today thriving with the majority of servers running Internet e-commerce websites running Linux and various other open source platforms (Miller, Voas, Costello, 2010). Ironically FOSS has also has never been more popular from an economics standpoint as well. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is making FOSS one of the most popular operating systems globally today, as the pricing on these system sis a fraction of Microsoft's (Miller, Voas, Costello, 2010). With the growing adoption of smartphones and tablet PCs including the iPad which runs a variation of an open source application, the future looks to….....