On Saturday 18 November 2006 21:42, Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
Funny, how open source people scream "FUD FUD FUD" at Microsoft all the time, but then they do a 180 and take every word from microsoft.com as gospel. Shouldn't they know better by now?
It is FUD. Microsoft is deep in the FUD business. The chair-throwing dancing monkey has a black belt in FUD. However, it's quite expensive FUD. If I get the figures right, Novell gets about half a billion dollars from Microsoft, and Microsoft gets some new FUD fodder in return*. Like being able to say "Linux uses our IP". No matter if that's true or not. I suppose the proof of that is in the same suitcase where the SCO proof is ;-). The indemnification, the protection money, is not worth much for Novell, but it doesn't seem to cost much, either (the money flow is in direction of Novell). The FSF will kill any attempt to make GNU&Linux proprietary, so being the only one who can sell an indemnification won't help - under attack you either have to sell a transitive indemnification that can be passed along further, or you sell nothing at all (that's already a consequence of section 7 of GPLv2). It's the typical devil's gold that turns into lead at dawn. But as long as Microsoft doesn't sue anybody, there's no violation of the GPL, because the indemnification is not necessary to redistribute further. Being granted not to be sued from Microsoft today is as useful for any Linux distribution like being granted not to be biten by the pitbull next door. *) And also may sell SuSE Linux coupons, if they like to (I can imagine Ballmer: "The whitest washing Linux ever**!!!11!!! Buy one, get one for free!!!11!!! Limited offer until our Windows-based FTP server will crash under the load!!!11!!!"). **) Must be this one, Ballmer is an expert: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Linux.vollwaschmittel.jpg -- Bernd Paysan "If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/