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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

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