Microsoft is apparently willing to spend its considerable cash reserves on becoming a serious challenge to Google but now it has opened up another front and started a battle with the opensource community over who has the exclusive rights to snippets of code.

Open-source software is becoming more and more popular in large companies with half of the Fortune 500 now using Linux and opensource software to run their immense data centres.

Microsoft was at first quite antagonistic towards opensource software: leaked documents from the company in 1998, known as the 'Halloween documents', showed that Microsoft saw opensource as a threat to its commercial business and outlined ways to eradicate this threat, some of which were Machiavellian in nature.

Since then the company appeared to relax its views on open-source to the extent that it now has its own lab devoted to working with the open-source community and as I reported earlier this year, took part in an open-source conference in Limerick. But now the old Microsoft from 1998 is back and it wants a cut.

The latest Microsoft missive says the reason opensource software is high quality is because it is using code that Microsoft owns, and Microsoft wants its pound of flesh in the form of royalties. Microsoft has patented many lines of code and now suggests that opensource software is using some of it.

But instead of going after those who own or wrote the open-source software, Microsoft is actually going after those who use it. This is surely ill-thought out, since most large companies use opensource software in tandem with Microsoft software.

Microsoft is in effect strongarming its own customers.

Software patents are a contentious issue in the world of IT, with many companies shouting and screaming for some kind of reform to the system where you can patent the equivalent of a mathematical formula. IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and many other large software makers have been filing patents for everything they create for decades but there has been a mutual understanding that nobody would get legal over it. Microsoft is changing this and might be starting the tech equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis.

Microsoft's competitors were quick to condemn the move. Sun's chief ponytail officer, Jonathan Schwartz, lectured Microsoft on his official company blog about how open-source is good for a company, how Sun embrace embraces open-source and how it benefits a business such as Sun. He didn't mention that Sun was on the rocks so needed to try something new and open-source was it.

Sun and others did. however. plan for the current Microsoft tactic and have already created the equivalent of a co-op for software patents to fight Microsoft.

Companies such as IBM, Oracle, Sun, Redhat, Novell and others are members of the Open Invention Network where they chip in their own software patents as well as providing financial support for the co-op.

This co-op is now pushing back against Microsoft and is saying that its members have just as many patents for software that they say Microsoft infringes on. The current system for software patents means we are seeing an arms race between software creators with them stockpiling more and more patents every year.

Once the first legal suit is fired we can expect reprisals from many sides which will result in nothing more than more lawyers making more money and an increase in uncertainty in the software development market.

While the open-source community is relishing the fight, it might cause enough fear and uncertainty for some companies not to consider using open-source in the short term if they think Microsoft is going to come after them for royalties, so it might be a small gain for Microsoft at the cost of a very messy legal battle.

Microsoft was courting developers recently in Las Vegas at the Mix conference, and the company impressed many by creating a development platform that makes it cheap and easy to build new web applications, but if Microsoft burns its own customers, what's stopping it from slapping patent infringement suits on the developers too?

In Ireland Microsoft is particularly active in the development community and is a genuine supporter of Irish companies but unless it starts thinking in 2007 terms and not 1998 terms, it might just lose a lot of the good will it has built up.

TWENTY MAJOR

AWARD-WINNING and '18s' rated blogger Twenty Major was irked last week when the Rock the Vote campaign started sending him press releases without asking. They thought he was interested in their campaign because of what he wrote on his blog about Rock the Vote.

The reality distortion field in Rock the Vote HQ must be on overdrive because Twenty was far from complimentary about the campaign. It would make a sailor blush. And laugh.

Each subsequent email asking them to stop fell on deaf ears and instead they asked him would he like to get more updates from them. While Twenty could make a spam complaint to the data protection commissioner, would they honour a complaint from a pseudonym? You can read Twenty's escapades on www. twentymajor. net