In a keynote opening the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, Red Hat Chairman Matthew Szulik Tuesday offered an oblique response to Microsoft's assertions that its patents cover code in Linux and other open-source products.

"We have great respect as an industry for IP. We expect that to continue," Szulik told about 400 attendees to the annual event that attracts open-source practitioners, primarily from start-up companies and their venture capital backers. But the view that patent holders are protecting their innovations in operating systems and other forms of software that now make up the infrastructure of many enterprises is probably suspect, he said in so many words. "There's very little empirical evidence that infrastructure patents are associated with innovation," Szulik said.

Szulik made no mention of Microsoft by name, but he later in the talk didn't hesitate to cite Oracle and its Unbreakable Linux campaign.

Nevertheless, he warned that patents can be wielded by their holders as a legal weapon. When young and promising companies are tied up in a patent dispute, "it could be years before you obtain a remedy in court. You could be out of business," he said.

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Lumbering into the large, slightly faded ballroom of The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, a crowd of mid-level and upper-level IT managers gathered to listen to the morning Open Source Business Conference keynote from Red Hat CEO and President Matt Szulik.

This is an interesting conference in the Linux and open source conference lineup: it's official goal is getting attendees to realize how open source can practically fit within their companies. Unofficially, it's about getting vendors and customers together. Yes, the topic is technology, but this is a business conference, no bones about it.

Conference Chair Matt Asay opened the conference with a recap of where open source is right now, citing $2 billion of investment in open source since 1997. Szulik, fresh from the recent Red Hat Summit, opened his presentation with one of the techno-multimedia-marketing presentations that Red Hat has been known for in the last couple of years.

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