Microsoft and FOSS
Free Open Source Software also known as FOSS has fared pretty good since the Microsoft posted a high-level summary of 235 patents that were allegedly violated in 2006. Foss has a lingering shadow cast by Microsoft claiming that the free and open software community has violated over 200 of their patents. One of the main consequences that could have come out of the lawsuit from Microsoft is FOSS goers w012ould no longer have access to free software. It’s good to individuals that used open source applications on their smart devices, to large companies which use these applications for daily activity for their need in their company. FOSS is great for everyone because it can be shared, copied, changed and of course downloaded. Everybody now in days have smart phones that carry FOSS operating systems. An everyday person likes FOSS instead of paying five dollars to 30 dollars for applications from apple, when if you have an Android phone it’s free. FOSS is not going anywhere just for the reason being that it’s free.
FOSS has good quality codes that can be changed, shared, copied at will, and downloaded. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task and it's pretty close to being crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. (Parloff, 2007)
FOSS has powerful corporate patrons and allies. In 2005, six of them - IBM (Charts, Fortune 500), Sony, Philips, Novell, Red Hat (Charts) and NEC - set up the Open Invention Network to acquire a portfolio of patents that might pose problems for companies like Microsoft, which are known to pose a patent threat to Linux. So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It's a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually...