Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (144 mails)
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Re: [opensuse-project] Re:Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Individual Contributors to openSUSE.org
- From: Martin Schlander <suse@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 15:05:30 +0100
- Message-id: <200611201505.30627.suse@xxxxxxxxxx>
Mandag 20 november 2006 00:36 skrev Saill White:
> Here is the question, more clearly this time: If Novell neither protects
> its contributors from legal action nor requires that its contributors
> refrain from taking legal action, how can Novell reach an agreement with
> Microsoft that allows Microsoft to protect/restrict Novell's contributors
> in these ways?
That whole part of the deal really is smoke and imho it's pretty unimportant.
It only has two effects..
1) It gives an impression that MS are nice guys that don't sue innocent
hobbyist developers (PR for the Redmond devils).
2) A purely psychological effect on people who might have been hesitant to
contribute to openSUSE for fear of MS patent litigation - assuming any such
person exisists. I personally doubt it.
The deal does not mean that any openSUSE contributor can infringe MS patents
as he pleases.. well, he could.. but only he himself could use that software.
Novell have clearly stated that no patented stuff will be included in neither
openSUSE nor SLE. Besides the covenant doesn't cover Novell, if MS patents
are infringed Novell would still get their asses sued.
The whole deal changes just about nothing for openSUSE.
- We'll have support for Office "Open" XML in OOo (but I personally expect the
patches will be accepted upstream and will be available on other distros too,
I actually think it's likely at OOo would have implemented the support
anyway.. after all they've worked their asses off reverse engineering .doc,
why wouldn't they support office "open" xml too?, after all it's less evil
than .doc).
- MS won't sue openSUSE boxset customers and code contributors.. well, did
anybody even consider the possibility that it could happen 4 weeks ago? ..
certainly not me, nothing changed here really.
- Stuff that's patented by MS will _not_ be implemented in openSUSE. At least
not in a way that infringes on those patents. So nothing's changed here.
- I guess virtualization will work better, but that's not crucial to most
openSUSE users I guess, and patches to Xen etc. will be free software of
course and available for other vendors. And it will _not_ infringe MS
patents.
Everything will be business as usual for the free software community. Stop
worrying about all the FUD and smoke.
Martin
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> Here is the question, more clearly this time: If Novell neither protects
> its contributors from legal action nor requires that its contributors
> refrain from taking legal action, how can Novell reach an agreement with
> Microsoft that allows Microsoft to protect/restrict Novell's contributors
> in these ways?
That whole part of the deal really is smoke and imho it's pretty unimportant.
It only has two effects..
1) It gives an impression that MS are nice guys that don't sue innocent
hobbyist developers (PR for the Redmond devils).
2) A purely psychological effect on people who might have been hesitant to
contribute to openSUSE for fear of MS patent litigation - assuming any such
person exisists. I personally doubt it.
The deal does not mean that any openSUSE contributor can infringe MS patents
as he pleases.. well, he could.. but only he himself could use that software.
Novell have clearly stated that no patented stuff will be included in neither
openSUSE nor SLE. Besides the covenant doesn't cover Novell, if MS patents
are infringed Novell would still get their asses sued.
The whole deal changes just about nothing for openSUSE.
- We'll have support for Office "Open" XML in OOo (but I personally expect the
patches will be accepted upstream and will be available on other distros too,
I actually think it's likely at OOo would have implemented the support
anyway.. after all they've worked their asses off reverse engineering .doc,
why wouldn't they support office "open" xml too?, after all it's less evil
than .doc).
- MS won't sue openSUSE boxset customers and code contributors.. well, did
anybody even consider the possibility that it could happen 4 weeks ago? ..
certainly not me, nothing changed here really.
- Stuff that's patented by MS will _not_ be implemented in openSUSE. At least
not in a way that infringes on those patents. So nothing's changed here.
- I guess virtualization will work better, but that's not crucial to most
openSUSE users I guess, and patches to Xen etc. will be free software of
course and available for other vendors. And it will _not_ infringe MS
patents.
Everything will be business as usual for the free software community. Stop
worrying about all the FUD and smoke.
Martin
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For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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