有時高官亂講話，被整死的卻是部屬。

這幾天微軟發言人室團隊為執行長Steve Ballmer的發言拚命想出完美的說詞來滅火，因為Steve Ballmer前些天在英國舉辦的一場大會上表示微軟考慮要控告Red Hat Linux的使用者侵犯專利權。

很嚇人吧？Ballmer在演講會後的Q&A議程時，竟然不小心透露出微軟打算對Linux使用者開刀，這讓我想到當然SCO也揚言要控告IBM與Rad Hat等Linux廠商侵犯的Unix專利，如今卻落得破產的下場。

當然微軟不會因此而破產，但微軟要控告Linux廠商及使用者侵犯專利權？拜託！前陣子微軟不是才信誓旦旦要擁抱開放原始碼嗎？怎麼這一會兒又要祭出法律大軍？

幸好這場會議有線上轉播，你可以親眼見證。

以下為Steve Ballmer的Q&A對談全文。

I think there will be multiple business models for software and services in the future. We happen to believe in what I’ll call a commercial model for us, because it’s a little hard to rent the office space here unless we have revenue, etc. But that doesn’t mean there’s one model that inherits the Earth. We’re saying as a commercial enterprise, we’re engaged in commercial software; there’ll be other people who will choose, for whatever set of reasons, and with whatever set of business objectives, to engage in an open source approach.

So what’s our strategy? A) To compete. When we have products that have open source competitors, we need to offer better value. Our products have to have more capabilities, they need to be better supported, they need more applications, they need more device support. We have to compete, where there’s a direct overlap.

Now, people focus a lot on Windows vs. Linux, or Office vs. OpenOffice. Sure, we’re competing. On the other hand, I’d also tell you the following is true: I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows. So we’ve done a lot to encourage, for example, the team building, PHP, the team building, many of the other open source components, I’d love to see those kinds of open source innovations proceed very successfully on top of Windows.

Because our battle is not sort of business model to business model. Our battle is product to product, Windows versus Linux, Office versus OpenOffice.

The only other thing I would say that is probably germane is, we spend a lot of money, the rest of the commercial industry spends a lot of money on R & D. We’ve spent a lot of money also licensing patents, when people come to us and say, "Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual property, we’ll either get a court judgment or we’ll pay a big check. And we are going to – I think it is important that the open source products also have an obligation to participate in the same way in the same way in the intellectual property regime.

That’s why we’ve done the deal we have with Novell, where not only are we working on technical interoperability between Linux and Windows but we’ve also made sure that we could provide the appropriate, for the appropriate fee, Novell customers also get essentially the rights to use our patented intellectual property. And I think it’s great the way Novell stepped up to kind of say intellectual property matters. People use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us. [emphasis ours]

There are plenty of other people who may also have intellectual property. And every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says, "Pay us," I suspect they also would like to eventually go to the open source world. So getting what I’ll call an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds I think is important.

可惜現在還不知道微軟的正式回應，如果微軟發言人室真的詞窮，建議可以與杜龜俠聯絡，若他沒有睡著，應該是願意指點一招半式。