Jonathan Schwartz of Sun recalls an interesting meeting on “patents” that he had with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft:
..Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.. We’re happy to get you under license.” That was code for “We’ll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download” – the digital version of a protection racket.
Microsoft is no stranger to imitating successful products.. when they created their web application platform, .NET, it was obvious their designers had been staring at Java – which was exactly my retort. “We’ve looked at .NET, and you’re trampling all over a huge number of Java patents. So what will you pay us for every copy of Windows?” link.