Microsoft was found guilty of software piracy last year by a French court, according to facts unearthed today by the geek community.
But the Redmond giant's conviction and three million franc (£285,000) fine somehow managed to escape the headlines. In fact, until today the only place the story has appeared is in French newspaper Le Monde Informatique.
And the only person who noticed the irony of the world's most aggressive anti-piracy firm being fined for piracy was Peruvian congressman Edgar David Villanueva Nunez.
Nunez inadvertently became a hero of the open source movement last month when he penned a letter to Juan Alberto Gonzalez, general manager of Microsoft Peru, arguing that the free software model does not break any intellectual property laws.
His letter was in reply to a complaint by Gonzalez over the proposal of a bill that would require the Peruvian government to only use free software.
In his argument, Gonzalez had claimed that the Peruvian bill "imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties".
But Nunez retaliated: "The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software.
"[An example is] the cond