I m not sure quite how you managed to deduce the first paragraph of your comment from what I said but no matter The reality is that free software just wants to survive in a hererogenous network based on open standards to ensure interoperability with everyone else while Microsoft has a 90 share of desktops and is leveraging this to displace open standards in an attempt to kill free software This strategy was outlined by a MS staffer years ago in the first of the Halloween documents The Microsoft Novell agreement is completely irrelevant because 1 Microsoft owns just two of the 125 patents in the VC 1 licensing pool and is not in a position to license the other 123 to Novell Linux or anyone else and 2 Novell is not Linux It is one of hundreds of companies that work in whole or in part in the Linux arena None of the others benefit in any way from the agreement On the contrary the agreement is generally being interpreted by the Linux community as a threat Ffmpeg stuff is legally dodgy in the USA because that jurisdiction has software patents SVG XAML AIUI the gist of the criticism from the sources cited is that 1 Microsoft has chosen to implement SVG type functionality within XAML Silverlight rather than as generic SVG within Internet Explorer IE is the only major browser that lacks SVG This has rendered a useful W3C open standard largely unusable 2 XAML is itself a standards buster because it mimics W3C stuff e g bits of CSS2 in an incompatible way