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Story: Microsoft denies Ballmer Linux 'warning'

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"Ravicher added that he feels Microsoft's customers are more at risk of being sued for patent infringement than those who use open-source."

That is a wrong feeling because Microsoft gives them unlimited indeminifcation and so any MS customer sued for a MS product will have the full legal capacitiy of Microsoft at hand.

"Not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for patent infringement, much less be found to infringe, while proprietary software, like Windows, is sued and found guilty of patent infringement quite frequently," said Ravicher.

The software is never sued, only companies can be sued. And that there was no court case so far does not mean that there has been no litigation or that no developer was threatened because of possible patent infringement. Just to cite one, the Author of the VirtualDub Software was threatened by Microsoft to remove the reverse-engineered ability for read Microsoft .asf files directly.

Also, as long as open source companies are small, the probility that one of them is willing to go to court in defense it low. It's more likely that small open source companies will try to find another way to get rid of the problem, so there will not be much public info on that.

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