How Microsoft Protects You from Patent Trolls

Did you know that tech companies spend 29 billion dollars each year on troll licensing and litigation of issues over patent trolls? 29 billion! The average settlement amount is about a million dollars – money spent that’s killing innovation!

Why am I bringing this up on Azure Every Day? Because Microsoft has philosophically changed the way it looks at patents and IP to better protect their customers. They just open sourced all their IP around their patents from all their open source products.

No big deal, they’re open source products, right? What you need to know is that Microsoft makes about 3.5 billion a year from its android patents. Over a billion of that comes from Samsung alone. Now they’ve open sourced that.

In simple terms, that means when you use these Azure tools and open source products on Azure, you are more protected from IP lawsuits. If some troll snatches a patent out from under Microsoft or from one of the open source companies, they can’t come after you for using that technology and not paying them.

You are protected because that is now an open source product. Microsoft has sacrificed a significant amount of revenue to make sure they have customers that are more protected than in other clouds – so, yes, it is a big deal.

If your company uses a lot of open source, this may not be news to you, but if you’re a company that’s looking to increase your use of open source or of Azure, it’s a huge investment by Microsoft to protect you.

If you’re interested in learning more about how the open source data world works in Azure and how you can take advantage of it, we’re the people to speak to. Click the link below or contact us, because no matter where you are on your Azure journey, we’re here to help.