Microsoft Goes All Wishy-Washy?

Microsoft has historically been considered a rough-and-tumble company who chews up and spits out others firms like a lumberjack with a mouth full of tobacco. Three fairly recent instances however have me a bit confused about their image.

1. Microsoft claims Linux infringes on hundreds of its patents. The FOSS community goes bonkers. Microsoft refuses to state which patents have been infringed upon. Still no group hug to make up.
   
   So...Microsoft is emulating SCO but with a substantially larger legal war chest?


2. Via BetaNews, "In a policy document specifically timed for release this afternoon, Microsoft's general managers for interoperability, Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli, make a play for ownership of the standards issue facing users of competing document formats, by saying the company would support ratification of its own Open XML format along with OpenDocument Format (ODF) as ISO standards, if and only if doing so would promote choice among the world's consumers."

No comment here. I'm still miffed over Massachusetts gutting its CIO's power and appointing Brian Burke, a MS anti-ODF lobbyist to the Governor's Technology Advisory Group.


3. "Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. The Silverlight 1.0 Beta has a go-live license that implies it can be used for commercial purposes."
   
   It implies it can be used for commercial purposes??? I was happy, however, to see the following on the installation page:
   
   "For Mozilla Firefox users:
   Save Silverlight.1.0beta.exe to your hard disk. Once the download is finished, click Open. The installation starts."