I think Brad Smith (picured) had all the good reasons to complain about "Who the heck signed me up for 60 minutes of Q&A (at OSBC)?"

Microsoft's top lawyer was not in friendly territory to say the least when he stepped in that ballroom full of open source die hards. The questions clearly showed a deep divide between Microsoft and the open source community in topics around patents and licensing. But that gave for an even more interesting and passionate conversation.

Clearly, Smith was trying to avoid direct confrontation with his "interrogators". But the Microsoft exec did shed light on the deep reason why the Redmond company can not play "nice" with Linux: it's all about the money! Below were the main talking points that were discussed. You can also listen to the full Q&A at the end of this post, and make your own opinion.

What about telling us what are the 235 Microsoft patents Linux is infringing upon?

"It is not something that anyone ever gives us as a commercial proprietary company the opportunity to do... People come to us, they have open source software, they have proprietary software and they expect us to take a license. We paid Sun Microsystems 4 years ago, $900 million for a patent agreement that only extinguish past liability and did nothing for the future except the opportunity to pay more money each of every year for the ensuing decade. We have many companies that do the same thing with us... If you are in the business and you have proprietary software and do have people that are asking you to take a license and they have claims and they are distributing both proprietary and open source software. It is very difficult to contemplate taking a step that won't be reciprocal in nature".

OK. So, thought about giving a free lunch to all those Linux afficionados?

"It's not something you'll likely hear in the near feature or probably [never... I couldn't hear that properly]... And primarily for 2 reasons. We actually do believe that patents do promote innovation. That's why we apply for them and a lot of companies in our industry apply for them. People assert there patents against us all the time. I don't think there are many companies in the industry that pay as much money as we do per year to licensing patents. We have a lot of money and I don't expect anybody to feel sympathy... A lot of companies that we hear from are sometimes companies that have a mix model. They maybe doing some proprietary products they maybe doing some open source products. I don't know of any company in our kind of position when it gets those kinds of demand from other companies that is prepare to say "We know that you're basing your future on this, we'll give you a free pass but you're not going to give us anything in return".

Brad Smith on letting a Microsoft patent licensee pass on freely "downstream" Microsoft patents:

"[This] one of the fundamental conundrum that makes it difficult to address. How can a Cathedral make an agreement with a Bazaar? There are a lots of Cathedrals that set up shop around the Bazaar. Xandros, Turbolinux, LG, Samsung... We were one of the earlier company in the industry to publish all of our patent application at the PTO in 1999. Sam Palmisano gave a speech last spring saying that IBM was going to do that... I think we will be prepare to sit down with any entity that has the ability realistically to take a license that address the issue in real terms".

and,

There's a hard problem that we haven't figured how to solve in that context. If a company with a patent portfolio and say come from the proprietary space were to do that. You enter with an agreement with company A. Once you do that and you do create those rights, it is the case that company A can pass along its software and that software can be changed... that software can go from customers and other competitors. And so the question that one has to think about... if you do an agreement like that with company A, will you have ever the opportunity to talk with company B. Why would company B come to you if it could gets its hands on even one copy of the software from company A and it got everything that it needs... Gosh this just seems very difficult from an economic perspective to make work.Because if its likely or possible that an agreement with company A means that oompany B will never come forward, then you can only do one license. and then how do you try to value that in a way that makes the licensor feel whole. And how do it in such a way that company A feels confortable paying for a license to the world. Fundamentally some of these things are business problems".

And on Linux and the open source community being a cancer and communism? Well these were just caricatures... sorry!

I don't think you have heard Bill or Steve or me or anybody else talking of those terms of late. We've been trying to have a more constructive conversation.