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."

Stanley "Tat" Thompson Snowstorm in Ashburn, VA --- Photon and Nero in the Snow

My late Uncle Stanley "Tat" Thompson of Zumbrota, Minnesota used to have a great line for the question that people invariably ask during this type of snowstorm, which is, "how's the weather where you're at?"  Tat's answer was usually, "clear and still".   The other person would say, "I thought you were getting hammered with snow?"  Then Tat would say, "Clear and still - snow clear up to your a$$ and still coming."

Below is a movie of our dogs Photon and Nero in the snow that is 16" and more coming.  We could end up with 2 feet of snow when it is all said and done tonight. This was Nero's first time in this type of deep snow.