Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (144 mails)

[Dan Winship <danw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 16:53 +0100, Martin Schlander wrote:
> 2) I don't like that Novell try to take advantage of customers being scared of 
> patent litigation. The way I understand things now, Novell are indeed paying 
> an innovation tax to MS, and at the same time saying: "we don't infringe 
> patents now, and we won't do it in the future either." Either they're 
> lying/wrong about infringing patents, or they're paying a truck load of money 
> to give customers a psychological sense of security that they pretty much had 
> before. Either case I'm not happy.

Look at it like this; if a child is convinced that there's a monster
under his bed that wants to eat him, his parents can try to convince him
that there's no such thing as monsters, or at least that there's no room
for a monster to fit under this particular bed, or whatever. But most of
the time, it ends up being a lot easier to just buy the kid a night
light. The parents know that the night light doesn't really do anything,
but it makes everyone's lives easier, so...

As you noted, Novell has publicly said that it doesn't know of any
patents that Linux infringes, and that if it found any problems, it
would fix them. To me, that shows that it's not trying to "take
advantage of customers being scared". It's just acknowledging that
*some* customers disagree with Novell's analysis of the legal situation,
and so it's providing additional assurances to those customers, even
though Novell believes that those assurances shouldn't be necessary.

(I don't speak for Novell blah blah blah you know the schtick)

-- Dan


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