There’s a brouhaha about how motherboard maker Foxconn has tweaked its BIOS to not run Linux without a lot of tweaking. You can read about it here or at Slashdot here.

What I found interesting is a quote from Bill Gates about how he was mad that Linux was (and is) able to use ACPI found in computer BIOSes. He wrote in an email:

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try to make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the API’s so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

And here’s the money quote:

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

If that isn’t direct evidence that Gates and Microsoft are using patents to stop Linux, I don’t know what would be.

And before someone claims that Gates was merely protecting ACPI, it’s an open standard. In other words, it’s not his to protect.