"Paul C. Leopardi" <paul.leopardi@iinet.net.au> writes:
Hi all, Apologies for the cross-post, but after I posted my reply on opensuse-amd64 I realized that it would be more appropriate to post to this list. Essentially, I am concerned that "Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Individual Contributors to openSUSE.org" is incompatible with the GPL and that it may therefore slow down or halt contributions to openSUSE.org. I am especially concerned about Microsoft's suggested "provision" and want to know whether openSUSE.org will use Microsoft's language when accepting contributions.
See http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-amd64/2006-11/msg00016.html
Please bring the complete post over here... We're not going to accept contributions from anybody that infringe valid Microsoft patents, see also my personal blog entry: http://www.novell.com/coolblogs/?p=629 IMHO the way that the acceptance of contributions works is different than what Microsoft envisions. Once the buildservice is up, I imagine: Developer A does some work, Packager B packages it and submits to the openSUSE buildservice and some person C accepts it into the factory distribution. This looks different to the above. We're reviewing the statements and I'll discuss with our legal folks what exactly this means for us and what we could do - and then let's discuss together whether we want to do it ;-) 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