I am not sure what's going on there. Though Novell may be the maintainer of Opensuse, they really can't impose. Microsoft can do whatever they want with Novell when it comes to SLES and SLED since they are considered "proprietary Linux". They can't sell the Linux operating system in and of itself but if they add additional support or third part software, it's then legitimate to sell a Linux distro. OpenSuSE has no such third party software nor does it have corporate support. If you have problems you have to check out the forums. It'd be REALLY hard for Microsoft to force their patents on OpenSuse mainly because it's open source. Also, do you think the community will allow that. None of us are going to give MS the money for patents. As long as we remain open source, microsoft will be really limited. We are a community and can do what we want w or w/o microsoft. Even if Novell wanted them to, as a maintainer, they must heed to the GPL. Being such a large company, if they don't, everyone will know. On Fri Nov 17 18:44 , "Paul C. Leopardi" sent:
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 "Microsoftâs 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 Best regards --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org
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