FWIW, it appears that here in the US, MS did a lot of lobbying for this year’s patent reform proposals, which were looking promising until the biotech industry blew them away. in other words, MS and open source agreed on something, for once ;)

I’m quite sure MS and many other big commercial software companies now recognise that software patent is Mutual Assured Destruction of our industry — they’re still filing furiously, because they feel that everyone else is, too, but they’d prefer not to.