Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (144 mails)

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul C. Leopardi wrote:
> Here are some of the questions I'll be asking later, possibly on Tuesday 28th:
>
> I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Pia Waugh's 
> comment, "Ballmer 0wnz us" http://pipka.org/blog/2006/11/23/ballmer-0wnz-us/ 
> about Bruce Perens' petition http://techp.org/petition/show/1 and about
> "Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Individual Contributors to openSUSE.org" 
> http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/community.mspx#E3
>
> In particular, does Ubuntu have a "binding contribution agreement" and does it 
> say anything like "as a condition of receiving the attached contribution of 
> Your Original Work, Ubuntu does not receive from You the contributor any 
> licenses, covenants or any other rights under any 'company X' intellectual 
> property with respect to that Original Work, and Ubuntu will ensure that all 
> further recipients of this Original Work will be subject to this same 
> condition", where 'company X' is eg. Microsoft? In your opinion, is such an 
> agreement compatible with GPLv2, especially in the case where 'company X' has 
> itself contributed software to Ubuntu under GPLv2?
>   
We don't have a contribution agreement for Ubuntu as a whole. We do have
contribution agreements for things like the Bazaar revision control
system (www.bazaar-vcs.org) which is under the GPL.

I think Pia and Bruce have spoken strongly against the Microsoft-Novell
deal because they can see clearly what Microsoft is trying to achieve.
Microsoft would like to ensure that customers fear to deploy any version
of Linux that is NOT blessed by Microsoft, and that boils down to any
version of Linux which does not include a patent fee. So OpenSUSE,
Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora and many other forms of Linux would be
banned under this agreement.

Worse, if Microsoft has its way, the developers of certain GPL
applications could themselves be sued by Microsoft. Remember - when
someone promises NOT to sue a person, they are implicitly saying they
would be willing to sue everyone else.

This is why the Samba team have taken such a strong position against the
Novell-Microsoft deal.

I'll be happy to answer further questions on the 28th. I think I've
taken more than my share of bandwidth on the SuSE lists for now, so I'll
go quiet here though I'm staying subscribed to the lists so I can keep
up with some of the discussions here.

Mark