Last Thursday Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's COO, warned a variety of Asian governments that Linux violates 228 patents. The implication is that governments shouldn't use it if they don't want to get sued. And say, as long as you guys are shopping for operating systems, have you heard of this little firm in Redmond, Washington?

Software patents are a serious threat to open source software like Linux. There are a lot of stupid patents out there for extremely obvious things -- Microsoft just received a patent for the double click, for example. Homegrown hackers can't reasonably be expected to do a thorough patent search before writing their software, project maintainers can't tell if code they accept is ripped off, and OSS users don't have a corporation in between them and IP owners who might get into a suin' mood when a piece of software violates their patents or copyrights.

Exactly how big a problem this is going to be is up for debate -- the author of the study Ballmer was citing says his results were willfully misinterpreted by Microsoft. And there are some companies like Novell that sell Linux services and offer indemnification to their clients; in fact, there's even a company that is solely in the business of allaying legal concerns over open source use. But IP lawsuits are still a legitimate concern for the OSS community, and Microsoft has been getting some real traction out of it.

So permit me some schadenfreude: it turns out Microsoft violates IP law, too. Every copy of Windows XP comes with some sound files -- startup chimes, incoming mail noises, that sort of thing. Inside the header of the file format there's some space for comments that's commonly used by the program authoring the file to identify itself. You can only see these comments by using a hex editor or a specially tailored program, but they're in there.

You might be familiar with "crack" programs. For shareware or otherwise unregistered programs, cracks make some small modifications to the executable that allow the software to be pirated. As it turns out, one particular crack for an audio editor named SoundForge also modified the comment inserted by SoundForge to include the cracker's name. And guess what has shown up in the comment area of those Microsoft-authored sound files?

It's a little unfair to jump on this -- all it really means is that some engineer at Microsoft had a piece of pirated software on his system. Checking every file with a hex editor in a mammoth product like Windows XP is not something we can reasonably expect, and I'm sure Microsoft doesn't have a policy of pirating development tools. But it's still pretty funny, and it'll be nice to see the evil empire dragged into court one more time.