Como diria o Cérebro:”vamos dominar o mundo”!!
Richard M. Stallman
“European legislators who endorse software patents frequently claim
that those wouldn’t affect free software (or ‘open source’).
Microsoft’s lawyers are determined to prove they are mistaken.
Leaked internal documents in 1998 said that Microsoft considered the
free software GNU/Linux operating system (referred to therein as
‘Linux’) as the principal competitor to Windows, and spoke of using
patents and secret file formats to hold us back.
Because Microsoft has so much market power, it can often impose new
standards at will. It need only patent some minor idea, design a file
format, programming language, or communication protocol based on it,
and then pressure users to adopt it. Then we in the free software
community will be forbidden to provide software that does what these
users want; they will be locked in to Microsoft, and we will be locked
out from serving them.
Previously Microsoft tried to get its patented scheme for
spam-blocking adopted as an Internet standard, so as to exclude free
software from handling email. The standards committee in charge
rejected the proposal, but Microsoft said it would try to convince
large ISPs to use the scheme anyway.
Now Microsoft is planning to try something similar for Word files.”