I have no love for Microsoft, but the whole antitrust suit based around Internet Exploder is and was total BS, plain and simple. The whole central argument against M$ was that Windows came bundled with IE, which automatically tanked competition from Netscape and others -- that's the biggest load of hooey I've ever heard. Let's look at OS's and DE's that come with their own browser, shall we... oh, right, er, all of them. If someone wanted to go after M$ for antitrust type practices, they should have nailed them when they started strong-arming PC manufacturers back in the day, to the detriment of OS/2, etc. Any lawyer that tried to sue Google for bundling a browser with an OS would also need to sue OSX, every Linux distro, Unix, the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS, WebOS, and any-other-damned-OS out there. That being said, I'm speaking rationally, and we all know that rather than rationality, the litigious world runs on cocoa puffs and gummy bears, not rationality.

"The best you can ever hope for with BSD is an incremental return." Unfortunately though, that incremental return may start to look a lot more attractive when factored against the monumental loss that patent wars with a company like Microsoft may cost you. Even if long term GPL-style licensing has a higher return, you have to survive as a company long enough term for that to apply. If Microsoft sues the bejesus out of anyone using that code, then companies will sacrifice that long term gain for short term stability, aka a BSD-style license. That being said, I'm not convinced that a BSD-style license would be the answer here anyway, but patent litigation is not cheap, so even if it's a partial deterrent to closed source patents, companies may jump on it. Now, my question to you licensing gurus: what does this mean for the overall Linux ecosystem? If Microsoft gets this patent enforced, are we looking at an MPEG style situation? Where distros start removing FAT support out of the box? THAT would truly be a disaster, as it's just one more hurdle for the average person to install and use Linux on a regular basis.

To put this in a way that will sound stupendously condescending: you live in a small market, your choices are limited, deal with it. That's one of the choices you make when deciding to live somewhere outside a mainstream market. Why would an ISP bother setting up infrastructure so "Ma and Pa Kettle" can have broadband? Where's the return on investment? Too often people seem to think they are OWED something, when in fact they aren't. As an example: my company started as a mac-only software company, it's what we did for the first 10 years we were in existence. Then we introduced a Windows version of our software that sold in tandem with the Mac version, opening up our options for selling software. When Apple switched from OS9 to OSX, we looked at the re-dev costs to move to a completely new software base (classic mode notwithstanding), looked at the fact that our Windows business was now 95% of our sales, and decided to drop our support for the mac platform. The point? I still get whiny mac folks to this day bitching about us not writing mac software, "forcing" them to use Windows. Do they care that it wouldn't have been at all profitable for us to do so? Do they care that the 5% that were our mac customers weren't enough to sustain that project? No, because they live in the "me, me, me" world of their own private bubbles. They think that we are somehow OBLIGATED to provide them that, and that we are FAILING THEM because we don't. Bullshit. No one owes you broadband, and if you choose to live in a market where it's not profitable for an ISP to provide it, then don't whine. At least you have clean air and less traffic, should I bitch about that on my side? But of course the Guberment is quick to agree with you, that it's somehow a 'right', so the whole thing falls apart in the end, and my tax dollars pay for you to have better competition. /rant