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Torvalds claims the time has come for Microsoft to put up or shut up. 'Naming them would make it either clear that Linux isn't infringing at all (which is quite possible, especially if the patents are bad), or would make it possible to avoid infringing by coding around whatever silly thing they claim,' he says in an interview with Information Week.

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'So the whole, "We have a list and we're not telling you," itself should tell you something,' Torvalds continues. 'Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, "nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!"'.

Microsoft yesterday specified how many patents it claims were violated by different software packages, but has yet to specify the individual patents concerned. The company claims the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents, the Gnome and KDE projects breach 65, Open Office 45 and 15 are infringed by email programs.

However, Torvalds claims Microsoft must have broken some patents of its own. 'It's certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does,' he says. 'Basic operating system theory was pretty much done by the end of the 1960s. IBM probably owned thousands of really "fundamental" patents.'