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On Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:12:23 +0000 Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: This has been covered in lots of places. There's no shortage of detailed responses to these spurious claims. The long and short of it is that just because company A pays company B does not mean company B has a claim on company A, that company B owns anything of company A or that anyone outside companies A or B are affected in any way. These are precisely the arguments that SCO used: "Oh, someone believes our nonsense claim of infringement therefore our claims are legally binding on everyone else. Give us money!". Duh? > http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35830 SCO all over again. "History repeats itself, it has to - nobody listens." The difference this time is that dealing with small-fry like SCO allowed GNU/Linux to have an excuse to audit all the code and so the provenance of all GNU/Linux source code is now clarified and even more rigorous than before. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061102175508403 "Those of you who think the most important goal is market share will be happy. Those of you who think freedom matters will want to throw up." Me? I'm looking for some anti-nausea pills . . . This is final and absolute proof that freedom matters more than market share. If anyone here still believes the opposite, get into bed with Novell and MS, pay your fine and say goodbye to your rights to share software. Free software is not shareware, it is not about popularity - it is about freedom and the right to share with your peers. This is what Microsoft and Novell have failed to understand. "I gather Microsoft no longer thinks Linux is a cancer or communism. Now it just wants a patent royalty from it. Wasn't that kinda SCO's dream at first? A kind of royalty on every box sold, every server shipped? Blech. And this "patent promise" is only for SUSE, so that tells the discerning observer that Microsoft will likely be suing others. As for Novell, if history means anything, it will end up Microsoft roadkill. It's so funny to me that nobody ever remembers what comes *after* the Embrace." (groklaw - link above) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/07/perens_on_ms_novell/ "Novell is in a desperate position - it has a smaller share of the market than Debian," Whilst that isn't a problem for community-driven not-for-profit Debian (which is actually in the black financially), it *is* a big problem for a commercial operation like Novell (who, IMHO, became interested in SuSE because they thought it could bankroll Novell out of the losses related to Netware). Anyone at LinuxWorld Expo could see the difference - the Novell stand alone must have cost many times what Debian paid - yet it was Debian who left the Expo with a profit! Novell disagree with Balmer's reported assessment: http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq_opensource.html So, just like SCO, it's time for MS to put up or shut up. Make absolute, detailed and legally binding explanations of precisely which lines of code in which source files of which projects are in dispute. Yes, that does mean "lines 54 to 100 of foo.c in project bar committed to public RCS on date by username conflict with lines 200 to 246 of foofoo.c in Windows project vomit and you only have our word for it that this happened before the date specified in public RCS of your project.". They have to do the work. If there is any basis to the claims, the rest of the community will just rewrite the affected code and carry on. Packages in the line of fire this time are OOo (XML), Samba and Mono. Gee, why am I not surprised that it concerns the main projects actively trying to interoperate with Windows? What was that fine the EU levied against MS all about again? The only loser I can see in any of this is Novell. The community may well be able to rescue SuSE as a community project, like Fedora, but Novell? Remind me, who were they again? The underlying danger: "With this agreement, Microsoft also secures Novell's assistance in pushing a pro-Software-patenting agenda in Europe and elsewhere." (groklaw, link above) This makes the FFII and the discussion of how to prevent software patents even more important. If you want to be using free software in the future, join the fight against software patents NOW. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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