When I first read the Microsoft saber rattling article in Forbes a week ago where Microsoft claimed open source projects including Linux, OpenOffice and others violated 235 of Microsoft's patents, my first thought was: "Is that all?" Out of the millions of lines of code those open source projects represent, the idea that they allegedly violated 235 patents is absolutely amazing considering there are patents granted on the most mundane things like transferring data from one computer to another over a network. I would have thought the number of violated patents was much, much higher. If Microsoft would have made the claim that open source projects violated exactly 8,154 patents, I would have believed it. Imagine trying to commute to work in a Tokyo subway and not rub up against anyone else or step on a foot. That's the visual picture of the patent landscape today. Given how loosely and freely the patent office hands out its goods, it's not an exaggeration to say it's impossible now to create a product without violating a patent somewhere. The question isn't whether a patent is violated when new software is developed, the only question left is whether a patent holder somewhere will press its case. If your product is successful, it's a given you'll have to defend. Microsoft might be the poster child of frivolous patents, but recently when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and claimed their development resulted in over 500 patents (applied for or awarded, I don't know the exact details), he was bragging about how innovative they were, but it's truly a sad day when one device can lay that much claim in the intellectual land grab game that's been going on for the last 15 or 20 years in technology. The iPhone will be a distant footnote in technology history by the time its patents expire. To be sure, Microsoft must see patents as a double-edged sword. No doubt, frivolous patents have been used to extract money from the company. So, in some ways I can't blame them for puffing up their patent portfolio for defensive purposes, but the threshold they're using to activate those defenses seems to be lowering day-by-day. Either they're getting weaker, feel more vulnerable, or open source is getting stronger for these kinds of PR skirmishes to be breaking out into the open.