then go and help to build the cloud

And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.

I believe this assumption is flawed. I would argue there is exactly a 50% chance that computing would have improved without Microsoft, and a 50% chance that the alternative time-line would have produced a worse outcome for users (by current standards).

The challenge of analyzing alternative outcomes is that it is impossible to determine what other factors would have risen to dominance to in determining the course of the industry in the absence of Microsoft. For example, just to take the context of your own statement (Microsoft's monopolistic approach), it is easy to forget that when Microsoft emerged, the IT industry was already in the grips of a different monopoly - IBM.

Had Microsoft not created a level playing field enabling the growth of a multi-vendor PC industry, IBM might have been in a better position to sustain its monopoly by constraining the growth of PCs so that they remained in the "comfort zone" of its own business model, leaving the choicest opportunities for its lucrative mainframe/mini-computer business. In this "alternative universe", we might all still be using variations of mainframe terminals for our day-to-day computing.

Do you really thank that state of computing would be "ahead" of where we are today?

Wow. Novell just did something that

a) They're good at.

b) It's hard for the FOSS community to do.

c) Helps the FOSS community a lot.

I think I speak for just about everyone when I give a hearty "Thanks!" to Novell.

Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.

[Sigh] Yes, this is always where the argument gets uncomfortable, because you're forced into a position of attacking someone's current source of income, and that pretty much always makes people unhappy.

You're posting AC and didn't link to the patent, so I assume that you don't want people to know who you are. This is a little unfortunate, since I have to be abstract. However, I can say that, despite reading a number of software patents, I have seen not one idea that I would consider novel enough and intelligent enough in software to warrant a patent -- stuff that wouldn't have been produced without a patent in place and that actually helps mankind. The RSA patent qualifies as a non-trivial, very helpful patent, but the ideas behind RSA were developed without a patent as a driver, more as a personal interest. It is possible, of course, that RSA would not have been publicized in such an event, though, so I'll give RSA a pass. Other than that, though, I've seen a huge flood of bullshit patents. If I go to the USPTO and search for "computer", the hits that come up are a mass of ridiculous, obvious (in the conventional sense, not the legal sense unfortunately used to determine patent validity) patents.

So, I can't see your patent and say "that should really not be a patent". However, I don't understand why, if you have the ability to come up with a new mechanism, you can't simply implement it and make money from that.