Have to jump on this comment - you are referring to two distinctly different things. The SCO lawsuit with IBM is over copyrights, not patents. VERY different. The lawsuit with Novell is more about defamation than anything.
Novell feels that our patent portfolio is in use in a large number of MS products, one in particular, MS AD. This is the foundation for the patent portion of the agreement. You have to remember that MS is a marketing machine, they are not bound by ethics as most media.
Novell was a founding member of the OIN to subvert any actions that MS tries to take around patents with Linux. As such the patent portion of the business agreement is simply to protect mutual customers and has little to do with Linux. Another indemnification plus for Novell customers, nothing more. The media and others are blowing it well out of proportion simply due to the lack of knowledge/understanding of the agreement specifics since it's private and a business arrangement between two companies.
I haven't commented on this list about it, but this will be the only comment I will make. Please go read and understand the truth from Novell on it's website... http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft
JP
>>> On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 4:26 PM, in message
<550673.15858.qm@web60419.mail.yahoo.com>, warren harris <war4val@yahoo.com>
wrote:
> Novell has asserted that it owns Unix. The SCO thing seems destined to flop,
> or at least we'll know Feb '07. So M$ has done a flanking movemnent.This war
> ain't over yet. Three cheers to Redhat for telling them to shove it and to be
> willing to back it up.
> Fedora 6 rocks!
>
> tom smith <atomsmitty@gmail.com> wrote: It looks to me that Ballmer had his
> accusations about Linux "patent
> infringement" as a planned agenda. The big public relations liability to the
> agreement between Novell and ms is the ease of implication that ms's
> software
> patents are valid.
> Smitty
> http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/community_open_letter.html
>
>
>
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