Kevin Donnelly <kevin@dotmon.com> writes:
On Friday 03 November 2006 04:08, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
I wouldn't call that selling the users down the river. Independent of the fate of Novell the deal will stop worries about MS killing the open source movement with patents.
Yes, though it's unclear from the press release whether the patent ceasefire is in perpetuity, or merely for the duration of the Novell agreement (up to 2012, IIRC). I got the impression it was the latter, so there is the difficulty that Microsoft could argue in any future legal assault that one of the leading distro makers explicitly accepted there were patent issues in Linux. That's not so good.
This one is irrevocable - for ever, 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