On 2006-11-03 17:59, M Harris wrote:
On Friday 03 November 2006 15:49, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
So, please enlighten me in case I have made any error here:
Ok..
At this point in time M$ has not one word to say ... and that I believe is the entire point of your entire previous post... and you're missing the issue.
I am not missing any issue. I don't care if it is present tense or future tense, there is no way that Novell is going to be able to tinker with the kernel as claimed in the web-dropping Fred cited, without facing a huge legal challenge from the entire open-source community, beginning with Torvalds and the FFS, and probably extending all the way to IBM. There is no way that Linus Torvalds will allow Novell to place *anyone's* patented material into the kernel, then claim an infringement against the non-Novell Linux community. That would terminate Novell's licence to the kernel source, the patented material would be removed within a day (just go back to the newest CVS tree before Novell began tinkering), and within a week, Novell and anyone associated with the little scheme would be faced with a multi-billion dollar countersuit.
The issue is the *future* of Novell-Mickey-Office-Linux... and the impact the *cross licensing* in the *future* will have upon Suse, the Linux community, and the open source movement in general.
It will have none -- the GPL is very clear on one thing: you cannot insert proprietary code into a GPL source and produce a proprietary package. Novell is free to put whatever complete packages it wants of its own into its own distributions, Microsoft is free to pick up SuSE and add some more of its own material to the distribution (would such a distro be called MicroSUSE?). The end result is not something that is subject to any patent or copyright claims, beyond the rather few individual proprietary packages added by either party, which no other distro in its right mind would pick up anyway. It certainly will *not* mean you or I will be sued if we choose to use OO.org instead of some possible future Linux rendering of MSWord.
If Novell teams up with M$ then Suse in the *future* will no longer have the trust of the open community. Do you honestly believe that Suse will honor the GPL with M$ in their pocket?
Once more, I ask you to state, clearly and without any additional buts/ands/wherefore or whereas, just how is Microsoft going to sue any open-source user who decides he is going to use OpenOffice.org instead of some as-yet unheard of Linux rendition of MSWord (or whatever other office suite Microsoft deems is "worthy" of its approval)? At this point, I am also going to suggest you go back and re-read the entire article (or read it a first time, in case you haven't already, which I am beginning to wonder about), because:
On the other hand... Ubuntu is safe... for the moment. I thought I could trust Novell. I was apparently quite mistaken about that... otherwise, I think I know what I'm talking about here.
You certainly do *not* know what you are talking about here, because the article clearly states that MS is now in a position to sue anyone who uses open source software *other* than what is on its "approved" list -- and that "anyone" means just that, regardless of distribution. The article clearly states anyone, using SuSE or otherwise, is open to lawsuit if MS decides they are using the "wrong" open source package -- and implies that any Linux user not using SuSe will likewise be sued.