Certainly, Microsoft's own recent behavior suggests that confidence is brimming over in Redmond. According to Fortune magazine, Bill Gates has a new spring in his step, and CEO Steve Ballmer is happily back on the warpath. Indeed, virtually everything these men are saying and doing right now demonstrates exactly why Microsoft got itself into trouble with the feds in the first place.

It seems, at the very least, that the DOJ should add an appendix to its brief against Microsoft. Wait, make that three appendixes -- one for each new instance of Microsoftian arrogance on the rise. There could be no better examples of how sure Microsoft is that it will get off with little more than a slap on the wrist. There's the company's newly aggressive stance against open-source software; its battle with America Online over instant messaging and control of the Windows desktop; and the pricing plans and piracy-fighting protections built into the new Windows/Office XP. Microsoft, it seems, has learned nothing from its travails except that it can get away with anything.

Exhibit A: The war on cancer

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times on June 1, Ballmer called Linux a "cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

And as if that wasn't inflammatory enough, the Microsoft CEO also provided the software world with an interpretation of the role of government in the software marketplace that can only be described as pure Orwellian doublespeak:

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"The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work," said Ballmer. "Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source."

So it's OK if the federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing Microsoft software for use in its many departments, even though the source code to that software is locked up by patents and copyright restrictions and everything else Microsoft lawyers can think of -- but the government can't fund software that is truly designed to be accessible to the general public.

The line "if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source" is staggeringly misleading. Yes, it is true that there is a vigorous debate within the software programming community over exactly how proprietary software and free software can be "integrated." It's a complex question with intricacies that have never been hammered out in front of a judge, so no one really knows the answer.

But Microsoft doesn't seem to notice that even the free-software GPL (general public license) that it is so intent on demonizing has an alternative -- the LGPL, specifically designed to assuage the concerns of precisely those commercial interests wary of what they can or cannot do with software that has been protected with the more rigorous GPL. And then there are scores of other licenses that let you do anything you want.

But even if the most venomous interpretation of the GPL is true, there's a very simple answer for companies like Microsoft, fearful of entanglement with the stain of free software: Don't turn to open-source software at all -- instead, innovate, like Microsoft's marketing literature says. Strictly written free-software licenses aren't designed to make it difficult for commercial software companies to do business; they're designed to prevent corporations from profiting off of the freely donated labor of programmers without giving anything back.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.