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> > I program in .NET and the Novell Mono work is fantastic. > > Then you, and developers like you, are going to have to be particularly > careful. Every single time you look at code from another project that > may help you in yours, your first question must always be "which > licence?". Whether your code is ready for distribution or not - if > there is the slightest chance that someone else will learn from or > incorporate your code into their project, you have a LEGAL obligation > now to be ultra careful in the provenance of your own code. Yes, legal: > if infringing code is traced back to you, any infringement could become > your problem, at the very least requiring a rewrite of the code to omit > the disputed section. > > I'm quite sure you cannot personally afford to defend against such > claims made by a pit of MS vipers (sorry, lawyers) in a US court. > They cant touch me for it. I'm not breaking the law here! And if it gets to the stage where I am breaking the law we're all doomed anyway! Doomed I tell you. Oh and (L)GPL2+ by the way. One reason I'm quite keen on .NET stuff is I think this will actually be m$ downfall - when I went to a m$ .NET seminar and they gloated about how they too were doing open standards etc etc I remember thinking they still didn't get it but thanks for the standards.. .. > > The real tragedy of it is they managed to amass a collection of superb > > developers, create a really good distribution and that will all go to > > waste. > > Not completely true. > > 1. A lot of SuSE-specialists are in opensuse. > 2. Migration of developers into Novell does not preclude their > migration back later. > 3. Free software developers are pre-disposed to be intolerant of > restrictions and have reduced (not absent) susceptibility to financial > penalties / lockins. > 4. Even if ex-SuSE developers don't go back to opensuse, the other free > distributions will be glad of their assistance. > 5. A lot of former SuSE releases are GPL themselves - these are safe. > > Microsoft and Novell will have to tread carefully to retain these > developers and the right to use the SuSE codebase. Its not easy for anyone to leave a job - especially people like the mono team who have so much invested in the stuff - and finding someone who can take on a team is quite difficult. If I win the lottery...but you have to buy a ticket first. Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html