The Day Microsoft Disclosed its Plans to Sue Open Source Projects

Of course these days Microsoft has made its peace with Open Source. They are a member of the Open Source Initiative and actually support my work on Open Source and Standards. It wasn’t always that way. There’s something I need to get off of my chest:

One day in the early 2000’s while I was working for HP, Microsoft met with HP management and disclosed to HP their plans to sue major Open Source projects. An HP vice president documented the meeting and sent an email about it suggesting that HP back off of its involvement with Linux, which was forwarded to me. My HP manager at the time was Martin Fink, a section manager at that time and later HP CTO. Martin told me to destroy the email.

Microsoft did not carry out the disclosed plans to bring those suits, but was subsequently documented to have been “backstop” of one of the investors of SCO while they brought their lawsuits. All of this time, I was aware of Microsoft’s plans and unable to talk about them due to an NDA. Other Open Source folks associated with HP were probably also aware and limited by their NDAs: Jeremy Allison said at the time: “please subpoena me”, meaning that he knew something he wished to have in the public but was constrained from talking about it.

Obviously, it’s not the same Microsoft today. However, I have been bothered now for decades about having to keep this secret from the Open Source community, to whom I owed a much greater loyalty than I could ever owe to HP. Obviously any legal binding that HP ever had upon me has expired.