OSS PING
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Posted on 06/26/2007 8:26:31 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Novell, Xandros and Linspire have signed well publicized agreements with Microsoft.
Rumors on the Web have hinted that we might be next on the list. So we would like to clarify our position.
At Mandriva, we believe working in heterogeneous environments is essential to our customers. So, interoperability between the Windows and Linux world is important and must be dealt with, and anything that helps this interoperability is a good thing.
We also believe the best way to deal with interoperability is open standards, such as ODF which we support strongly and we are ready to cooperate with everyone on these topics.
As far as IP is concerned, we are, to say the least, not great fans of software patents and of the current patent system, which we consider as counter productive for the industry as a whole.
We also believe what we see, and up to now, there has been absolutely no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagators that Linux and open source applications are in breach of any patents. So we think that, as in any democracy, people are innocent unless proven guilty and we can continue working in good faith.
So we don’t believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone.
We plan to keep developing and distributing innovative and exciting products and making them available to the largest number in the true spirit of open source.
OSS PING
If you are interested in the OSS ping list please mail me
What’s the background here? MS is threatening to sue all the linux developers?
Developers, users, customers, ...
MS has been claiming, for some time, patent violations in Linux but refuses to name them (hence the fud aspect of this whole thing). MS then got Novell to sign a deal with them for mutual patent protection, then linspire and xandros (which surprised everybody) also made deals.
Redhat came out saying that until they had more information they would enter in to no such deal.
The worst part of all of this is the nutballs at fsf are using tivo and the MS-Novell deal to try and push through the GPL3.
Were I a major Linux distributor I would sit down with MS and hear what they had to say and if it made business sense make a deal. They are, after all, not the devil but I would be very careful given the history of companies that partnered with them.
Sounds like Xandros is going to go to corporate customers and say "you should choose us over red hat because if you choose us you won't have a war with microsoft".
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