Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has gotten a lot of people's knickers in a twist by saying that Red Hat users owes Microsoft patent payments.

He dropped the nugget during a Q&A last week in England captured on tape and put on the Internet.

He was talking about how open source products "have an obligation to participate in the same way in the intellectual property regime" as commercial companies with their hefty R&D budgets and patent licenses. Then - after praising Novell for its open source-scandalizing patent indemnification deal with Microsoft - he uttered the words: "People [who] use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us."

It was the first time Red Hat, the "no-patent-deal-ever" market leader, was publicly singled out like that as a patent infringer, but it's consistent with Microsoft's position that Linux and some of the other open source widgetry infringe 235 of its patents.

Ballmer then went on to say: "There are plenty of other people who may also have intellectual property. And every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says 'Pay us,' I suspect they also would like to eventually go to the open source world. So getting what I'll call an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds I think is important."

Ballmer also said, "I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows."