Microsoft is not the real patent threat Linux and open source developers should be worried about, said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. In fact, the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years, Shuttleworth predicted.

“I’m pretty certain that, within a few years, Microsoft themselves will be strong advocates against software patents,” Shuttleworth wrote on his blog. “Microsoft is irrevocably committed to shipping new software every year, and software patents represent landmines in their roadmap which they are going to step on, like it or not, with increasing regularity.”

Microsoft makes the “perfect target” for software patent lawsuits, and the company will pay more for such suits every year until they finally threaten its business, Shuttleworth said.

“Microsoft will lose a patent trench war if they start one, and I’m sure that cooler heads in Redmond know that,” he wrote. “The real threat to Linux is the same as the real threat to Microsoft, and that is a patent suit from a person or company that is NOT actually building software, but has filed patents on ideas that the GNU project and Microsoft are equally likely to be implementing.”

But even such companies – sometimes known as “patent trolls”, although Shuttleworth said he himself dislikes the term – are not themselves the real enemy. “They are only following the rules laid out in law, and making the most of a bad system,” he wrote.

I’ll withhold my opinion of Patent Trolls and the lawyers who represent them – for now. I’d rather see some discussion of Shuttleworth’s opinion.