Sun Microsystems and Microsoft OpenOffice Patent Meeting

I saw this thread on patents at EE Times and thought this is a great defense use of patents.   This EE Times thread referenced the original article at Softpedia.

This is a great Sun Microsystems versus Microsoft story for all of us old SUNWers :)

[as told by Jonathan Ian Schwartz, then CEO of Sun]

"As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill [Gates] skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, 'Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.  We're happy to get you under license.' That was code for 'We'll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download' – the digital version of a protection racket."

Sun Microsystems did not ink a patent covenant agreement with Microsoft.

[Schwartz' reply to Gates:] "'We've looked at .NET, and you're trampling all over a huge number of Java patents. So what will you pay us for every copy of Windows?'  ...it was a short meeting."