One other thing - Novell has refuted Ballmer's claim that the payments Novell will be making to Microsoft as part of the deal is for Microsoft IP.
Novell says they are paying Microsoft for their agreement not to sue Novell customers, not for any IP, and that Novell is not purchasing licensing to any Microsoft patents as a result of, because of, or in order to, do this deal.
Note that there also is no indemnification of Novell itself - this is simply IP indemnification of Novell customers (and not just their SuSE customers.) It's another selling point for Novell software that not only does Novell indemnify their customers, so does Microsoft.
Ballmer can belch FUD in his sleep. Don't buy into it. Don't buy into the knee-jerk FUD the slasdotters are spreading about Novell or any Novell-supported product.
Boycotts are just plain stupid, and tend to hurt the boycott-ers more than the boycott-ees. If you must boycott anyone in
this deal, boycott Microsoft. Don't buy an X-box.
Jim Stalewski <jstalewski@yahoo.com> wrote: Yeah, that's just Ballmer being Ballmer, spreading more FUD about IP. There's no Microsoft IP that will be added to any GPL code. Novell has made that statement repeatedly, as has Miguel de Icaza stated in no uncertain terms regarding Mono. You'll notice Ballmer won't own up to exactly *what* Microsoft IP he thinks is supposedly in Linux. That's because there isn't any. It's just more Ballmer blowing smoke out his ass, as usual.
If there were any Microsoft patented code in Linux, do you really think Microsoft would hesitate to sue everyone for it?
They know that if any were uncovered, it would be written out in an eyeblink and they'd have no case.
The "IP indemnification" thing here is
way overblown. I'm sure next week we'll see some official statement from Microsoft trying to cover Ballmer's ass for making an ass of himself in public again.
"Geir A. Myrestrand" <geir.myrestrand@falconstor.com> wrote: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9005171&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1
Jim Stalewski wrote:
> I think you're all (except for Harald) off-base and are falling prey to
> anti-M$ "fud" from the OSS community.
>
> This deal does not have anything to do with OSS per-se, or the
> inclusion/exclusion of proprietary, licensed, patented M$ crud finding
> its way into OSS projects like OpenSuSE.
>
> http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq_opensource.html
>
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq.html
>
> OpenSuSE is not part of the M$ agreement. It's partly a promise to
> extend patent indemnification to Novell customers. OpenSuSE is fully
> OSS, so that's not part of it at all.
>
> The co-development part of the deal, as concerns OSS, only concerns
> making it easier to use virtualization technologies to support a mixed
> open and closed source environment, and making sure OpenOffice will
> interoperate well with MS Office when M$ pushes their "open" format on
> their victims.
>
> It has nothing to do with a) putting closed-source, patented code into
> OpenSuSE or any of the programs that come with the OpenSuSE Distro or b)
> putting closed-source, patented code into OpenOffice.Org or changing the
> OpenDocument Format.
>
> Get a grip, folks.
>
> */Bjoern JACKE /* wrote:
>
> Hi Harald,
>
> On 2006-11-17 at 06:41 +0000 Harald Milz sent off:
> >Jose Luis Ricardo Chavez wrote:
> >> what extent do Novell have control on the OpenSuSE distribution?
> Is it
> >> also covered by the MS-Novell deal?
> >
> >No, it is not covered. OpenSUSE is a community effort, very much like
> >Fedora.
>
> I think you are wrong here. AKAIK OpenSUSE is also covered by the
> patents part of the Novell-Microsoft deal. One may like that or not.
> And OpenSuSE is still a very Novell-driven distro there is not much
> the community can really have influence on. To call it a "community
> effort" or not very much depends on what you mean with having
> influence. Mostly anything you can do is report bugs and make
> suggestions in an open bugzilla but if Novell does not like
it it
> won't be done. This is not what I understand to be a "community
> effort".
>
> Cheers
> Bjoern
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--
Geir A. Myrestrand
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