Probably just smoke and hot air. As an open source community, we all have to be on board, not just Novell in order for us to work with MS. What I Think will happen, MS will have some of their engineers join the community, not to take over but to assist. That's all I can think of. Microsoft has contributed to other Open SOurce companies and communities but I think this is their first linux distribution to contribute to. I think they are going to help us but legally they can't force their patents into OpenSuSE. They can't decide, we're going to make OpenSuSE our OS. It's the communities, I think they are going to contribute to our development. Of course, they can't take complete control. The patent thing probably has something to do with them letting us know that they won't do anything to use their patents to destroy us. I don't know for sure, but I doubt MS is so dumb that they wouldn't realize that since OpenSuSE is GPL'd, they can't do anything to take it over. On Sat Nov 18 15:17 , Saill White sent:

On 11/18/2006 11:32 AM, Chris Bonner wrote:

...

susedevel@torchlighttech.com','','','')">susedevel@torchlighttech.com>> wrote:

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.

I completely agree.

That's why it's so creepy that Microsoft mentioned OpenSuse so specifically in "Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Individual Contributors to openSUSE.org"

How can this be legally binding? Did openSUSE.org sign some kind of agreement with Microsoft? Is Novell allowed to enter into legal agreements on openSUSE.org's behalf? Or is this all just smoke and hot air?

Saill

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