Thank you, someone said it. I am glad. Nothing is changing. I think we may see
some MS engineers in these forums and helping develop. I don't know how much they
can do though without putting patents in but I am sure they'll give us stuff that
they don't care about nor want like MS Solitaire or something. That or they may
release a new breed of MS open Source Software, who knows. Ultimately, it doesn't
effect us in the community. I am glad that someone was able to explain cause I
think I only made situations worse, LOL. I am Jay by the way for anyone whom
wanted to know.
On Mon Nov 20 6:05 , Martin Schlander sent:
>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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