For as irritating as Steve Ballmer’s saber-rattling is about Linux and patents, I think he is right about one thing:

He predicted that firms like Eolas will soon come after open source vendors or users. Microsoft paid $521m to settle a patent claim by Eolas in August.

“Every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says: ‘Pay us,’ I expect they eventually would like to go to the open source world [as well],” said Ballmer.

[vunet.com]

Microsoft’s FUD is somewhat damaging to the Linux landscape, but they’re unlikely to come after Linux distributors for the well-known “mutually assured destruction” reasons. The real danger are the patent trolls like Eolas or NTP — remember their huge lawsuit with RIM that almost shut down the Blackberry network? The infighting amongst the community (*cough* with Novell) is counterproductive to the larger goal. We need to advocate for patent system reform — like getting involved with the peer review that the USPTO has recently launched — and lean on the corporate backers of open source to use their resources to help solve this problem. They’re the ones most likely to get attacked, after all. Until then, sadly, we have to play the game and get as many defensive patents as possible, while rebuffing Microsoft’s scare tactics at the same time.