Mandriva Refuses Microsoft’s “Protection Racket!”

Mandriva Linux has put out a statement against the Microsoft protection scheme:

“Novell, Xandros and Linspire have signed well publicized agreements with Microsoft. Rumors on the Web have hinted that we might be next on the list. So we would like to clarify our position. At Mandriva, we believe working in heterogeneous environments is essential to our customers. So, interoperability between the Windows and Linux world is important and must be dealt with, and anything that helps this interoperability is a good thing. We also believe the best way to deal with interoperability is open standards, such as ODF which we support strongly and we are ready to cooperate with everyone on these topics. As far as IP is concerned, we are, to say the least, not great fans of software patents and of the current patent system, which we consider as counter productive for the industry as a whole. We also believe what we see, and up to now, there has been absolutely no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagators that Linux and open source applications are in breach of any patents. So we think that, as in any democracy, people are innocent unless proven guilty and we can continue working in good faith. So we don’t believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone. We plan to keep developing and distributing innovative and exciting products and making them available to the largest number in the true spirit of open source.”