● 03.13.12

●● Microsoft Sends Out Lawyers to Shut Down Competition

Posted in Microsoft at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft poison pill in the form of EULA

Summary: News about the struggle of a small company against Microsoft’s monopoly

THE EULA is to Microsoft a key part of the business model, which is basically renting binaries over and over again. We wrote about Microsoft’s various EULA matters before [1, 2, 3] and now that a company makes Microsoft’s platform accessible over the Web the lawyers step in:

The OnLive Desktop app enables users to run a Windows desktop on an Apple iPad or Android tablet, freeing users from their PCs even if they want to use Microsoft Office. It’s a great innovation from cloud-streaming firm OnLive, but Microsoft said this week that the app is apparently in violation of licensing terms for Microsoft’s operating system.

Once again we are seeing how lawyers — not developers — take a leading role at Microsoft. The target of Microsoft’s lawyers is not FOSS this time around. As Pogson points out, “OnLive has patents, apparently… Sigh. Interestingly, OnLive runs GNU/Linux on their website.” █

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