Clearly Balmer is arranging his smoke and mirrors to try to make it seem that all open source consisted of violating Microsoft's intellectual property. In fact, the converse is true: Microsoft remains a net consumer of open source, going all the way back to using the BSD TCP stack in early Windows, to basing "Windows for Unix" on OpenBSD's userland code. And, the position he is clearly trying to advocate - without coming out and saying it, of course, is equally false. Microsoft is well known for patenting things they did not invent; see their recent embarassment at trying to patent ideas they freely admit they copied from the BlueJ IDE.