morgan_greywolf's Journal: Another Open Letter to Brad Smith

This is another open letter to Brad Smith, Microsoft's general legal counsel, in regards to their thinly veiled Linux patent threats and related lawsuit against TomTom.

(Disclaimer: As I am a nobody as far as Microsoft is concerned, I don't honestly expect Brad Smith or anyone at Microsoft to read this, and I don't care. Mostly I'm just blowing off steam and getting my beefs out in the open).

So it's come to this, is it? Suing over an ancient filesystem developed from the the 1970s (FAT) and the assorted ugly hackish kluges that have been necessary to keep the decrepit pile of garbage on life support? The one that only became a defacto standard because at one time its use was all but mandated by some older versions of Microsoft Windows that didn't support anything else? You know, the one originally developed for floppy disks?

Why don't you just stop your lawsuit now before you get laughed out of the courtroom? Seriously, you guys are starting to look more and more like your old sock puppet, The SCO Group? Remember them? Yeah, they're basically on life support now thanks to IBM, Novell and Red Hat practically bankrupting them. Guess they chose the wrong opponents to pick a fight with, huh?

So you thought maybe TomTom would roll over and play dead, eh? I guess they didn't. Especially now that they're backed by the Open Invention Network.

So you have $20 billion in the bank? Wanna watch that money continue to slowly dwindle whilst you fight the Linux community? You don't get it do you? A lot of people with serious cash have a vested interest interest in watching Linux succeed in dwindling your market share. You think others in the industry aren't prepared to enter the melee between you and TomTom? Wrong.

Give it up before you embarrass yourself. Seriously.