Paul C. Leopardi wrote:

Here are some of the questions I'll be asking later, possibly on Tuesday 28th:

I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Pia Waugh's 
comment, "Ballmer 0wnz us" http://pipka.org/blog/2006/11/23/ballmer-0wnz-us/ 
about Bruce Perens' petition http://techp.org/petition/show/1 and about
"Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Individual Contributors to openSUSE.org" 
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/community.mspx#E3

In particular, does Ubuntu have a "binding contribution agreement" and does it 
say anything like "as a condition of receiving the attached contribution of 
Your Original Work, Ubuntu does not receive from You the contributor any 
licenses, covenants or any other rights under any 'company X' intellectual 
property with respect to that Original Work, and Ubuntu will ensure that all 
further recipients of this Original Work will be subject to this same 
condition", where 'company X' is eg. Microsoft? In your opinion, is such an 
agreement compatible with GPLv2, especially in the case where 'company X' has 
itself contributed software to Ubuntu under GPLv2?

We don't have a contribution agreement for Ubuntu as a whole. We do have contribution agreements for things like the Bazaar revision control system (www.bazaar-vcs.org) which is under the GPL.

I think Pia and Bruce have spoken strongly against the Microsoft-Novell deal because they can see clearly what Microsoft is trying to achieve. Microsoft would like to ensure that customers fear to deploy any version of Linux that is NOT blessed by Microsoft, and that boils down to any version of Linux which does not include a patent fee. So OpenSUSE, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora and many other forms of Linux would be banned under this agreement.

Worse, if Microsoft has its way, the developers of certain GPL applications could themselves be sued by Microsoft. Remember - when someone promises NOT to sue a person, they are implicitly saying they would be willing to sue everyone else.

This is why the Samba team have taken such a strong position against the Novell-Microsoft deal.

I'll be happy to answer further questions on the 28th. I think I've taken more than my share of bandwidth on the SuSE lists for now, so I'll go quiet here though I'm staying subscribed to the lists so I can keep up with some of the discussions here.

Mark