If you haven’t been following the story, Microsoft has recently made claims on a broad scale that various open-source software applications are infringing on patents that Microsoft holds, and although many of the cited issues are not relatively new Microsoft has chosen now as a time to do something about it.

Basically open-source software is distributed to users without any fees, and the source code is available for developers to modify or build on and to give back to the projects and/or redistribute for free to others. Revenue is earned from open source software generally by selling related services surrounding the actual products. Alternatively, companies like Microsoft and many others build applications that require purchased licenses and make the money by selling the actual software. As open source applications become larger in numbers, more stable and subsequently more popular, they are most likely cutting into the revenue that Microsoft makes for selling similar products and showing up on their “threat-radar”.

The software giant recently gave out some additional details about the patent infringements saying that open source software infringes on 235 different patents that Microsoft holds, specifying that Linux violates 42 patents, graphical interfaces violate 65 and email clients trample on 15 of the established patents.

“There is no reason why any segment of the industry needs to be exempt from intellectual property rules,” Horacio Gutierrez, a Microsoft vice president for intellectual property and licensing, said in an interview Monday.

It appears that Microsoft isn’t necessarily out to start a battle of law-suits, but more to make agreements with the different companies as it did recently with Novell, agreeing to sell it’s SUSE flavor of Linux and not to sue Novell’s customers that bought the product.

A lot of the open-source community showed a displeased reaction to the deal with Novell and Microsoft, much as they are showing the same reaction to these patent infringement claims. Companies such as Red Hat and IBM have come together under the Open Innovation Network stating that they have a number of patents that Microsoft themselves are infringing upon and a retaliation would be at hand if Microsoft takes action.