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20061105 Sunday November 05, 2006

links for 2006-11-05

Posted by webmink ( Nov 05 2006, 04:22:12 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [5]
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Simon, Any contributor whose code is distributed by OpenSUSE (which includes all of Mono) is covered, see the link on my post. Miguel.

Posted by Miguel de Icaza on November 05, 2006 at 09:20 AM PST #

I'm sorry, Miguel, but the material is unclear on this subject (and I don't see anything precise on your blog). How about these scenarios:

  • Are all OpenOffice.org contributors covered then, OpenSuSE uses that too? If IBM join OpenOffice.org, does this mean their developers are all indemnified?
  • How about if Company Y pays its staff to work on Mono. Are those developers indemnified? Does Company Y have any protection if it uses Mono in it's Y-OS operating system?

My deductions about these questions are:

  • No, OO.o contributors as a class are not covered, only claims resulting from use of OpenSuSE are covered.
  • Company Y's developers are indemnified against claims resulting from Novell's use of their contributions, but not against the use of Mono in Y-OS.

I remember the impact of the Sun agreement well, and if my assumptions are correct I believe this makes Mono developers outside Novell less, not more secure.

Posted by Simon Phipps on November 05, 2006 at 09:43 AM PST #

An interesting question is whether, if Miguel is right, this also shields all the contributors of the libre java community since GNU Classpath and IKVM are distributed as part of Mono (and as part of GCC) on OpenSUSE and other distributions. Which link/pointer in Miguels blog entry are we talking about precisely?

Posted by Mark Wielaard on November 05, 2006 at 10:19 AM PST #

Given the Microsoft & Novell can't even agree if they've written a joint letter to the open source community, or if it's just Novell's letter[1], I'm looking forward to the SEC filings from both parties, to see how they interpret their agreement. [1] http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2507

Posted by Dalibor Topic on November 05, 2006 at 04:45 PM PST #

Seems like Microsoft also still doesn't really know or agree what the deal means. The claim now is Microsoft Denies Novell Deal is Breach of GPL and they even go so far as saying that being paid, but doing it for the love of it is just fine also:
While Torvalds is clearly being paid to work on Linux, it could also be argued that he is “acting in an individual non-commercial way” in the words of Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith.
This does smell like a lot of FUD. Seems nothing much changed at all except that Novell now needs to pay per shipment royalties to Microsoft.

Posted by Mark Wielaard on November 07, 2006 at 06:34 AM PST #

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