Torsdag 16 november 2006 14:52 skrev Saill White:
On 11/16/2006 12:51 AM, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
Jeff Jaffe's discussion style was very open and he answered our question clearly. It was not a nightmare,
Andreas
Andreas, I'm glad that you feel comfortable with the whole thing. Maybe in time everyone else will too. I still don't.
I must say that I agree with Saill to a certain degree. MS' motivations are still a mystery to me. MS pays a lot of money for SLE coupons..?? It doesn't make sense. I can see three possible explanations. 1) MS paid hundreds of millions of USD for the ability to FUD about interoperability with "Linux", office "open" xml and harm Red Hat. Doesn't seem realistic, though. 2) There's truth to rumours that Novell extorted MS with some patent dirt. (Rumour supported by Simon Phipps from Sun among others). 3) There's something else Novell has agreed to that they don't tell us about. It also confuses me that it was originally clearly stated that the covenant part would give a net gain to MS since they had the most patents, but when the financial details were later published they showed a huge net gain for Novell. I wonder if Jeff commented on any of that. However, whatever's going on I can't see how it can be harmful to free software or openSUSE, given the very public promises made by Novell since the deal was made. But I certainly share Saill's feeling that something more is going on than what meets the eye. Martin --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org