Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on November 28, 2006 10:27 PM
Well, these guys have lost any reputation for integrity they might once have had.
No need to point out most of the half-truths, they are obvious. Here are a couple of the less-obvious ones.
Are there any benefits for the whole open source community from this deal?
Nat Friedman: A few. We are collaborating with Microsoft on a few different interop areas. We'll be adding Open XML support to OpenOffice.org
That's a dis-benefit, not a benefit, because the effect will be to undermine the ODF standard in favor of Microsoft's proprietary "OpenXML".
Microsoft essentially lost in the US, and ended up paying Lindows a HUGE $24 million settlement. And all Lindows had to do was change the name.
In the Lindows lawsuit, Microsoft tied Lindows up in court for a long time, forced it to abandon the brand-name which it had spent a lot of money to establish, and all it cost Microsoft was a tiny, negligible (to Microsoft) $24M.. Clue: Microsoft's annual revenue is about 2000 times that.
Adrian L: I do not fear Shuttleworth, because people who fear that openSUSE might violate GPL will not go to a distro which actually is doing it.
If Ubuntu were violating the GPL it would get a call from the FSF's lawyers. Even Debian includes non-free drivers, in a section called "non-free". I really would prefer Ubuntu not to include non-free drivers by default, but disagreements like this are very minor in comparison with what Novell has done.
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Spin, half-truths, lies
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 28, 2006 10:27 PMWell, these guys have lost any reputation for integrity they might once have had.
No need to point out most of the half-truths, they are obvious. Here are a couple of the less-obvious ones.
Are there any benefits for the whole open source community from this deal?
Nat Friedman: A few. We are collaborating with Microsoft on a few different interop areas. We'll be adding Open XML support to OpenOffice.org
That's a dis-benefit, not a benefit, because the effect will be to undermine the ODF standard in favor of Microsoft's proprietary "OpenXML".
Microsoft essentially lost in the US, and ended up paying Lindows a HUGE $24 million settlement. And all Lindows had to do was change the name.
In the Lindows lawsuit, Microsoft tied Lindows up in court for a long time, forced it to abandon the brand-name which it had spent a lot of money to establish, and all it cost Microsoft was a tiny, negligible (to Microsoft) $24M.. Clue: Microsoft's annual revenue is about 2000 times that.
Adrian L: I do not fear Shuttleworth, because people who fear that openSUSE might violate GPL will not go to a distro which actually is doing it.
If Ubuntu were violating the GPL it would get a call from the FSF's lawyers. Even Debian includes non-free drivers, in a section called "non-free". I really would prefer Ubuntu not to include non-free drivers by default, but disagreements like this are very minor in comparison with what Novell has done.
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