Kevin Donnelly
That is interesting. It would be a good idea for Novell to put out some additional explanatory material in the next few days, addressing the various excitable comments that have been made in discussions on this.
I expect something like this to happen soon.
In particular, is Novell suggesting that there is some truth to the suggestion that parts of Linux infringe patents, or is it simply accepting that Microsoft has rights over its own stuff (eg codecs)? Most comments on the net tend to assume the former, but I would have thought the latter is equally plausible.
Not at all. We're of the opinion that there are no patent infringements right now in Linux and the deal does not imply that we think so. There 're just a lot of customers that want to be on the safe side and we help to protect them *if* such a case applies.
The only fly I still see in the ointment is the phrase "individual, non-commercial developers". For example, does this mean that a group of non-commercial developers, or a single developer who decides to sell a service based on the app he's developed, are not covered?
And as Marcel Hilzinger said: "Why are there 2 different points in the patent question? Will there be a difference between OpenSUSE and Suse Linux Enterprise? What about contributors to OpenSUSE.org whose code is _not_ included in the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform? Are they covered by the second statement?"
I hope this gets answerd on our coperate side, I'll forward this, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126