Microsoft, where quality is job 1.3
"It was recently decided in a court of law that certain portions of code found in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Access 2002 infringe a third-party patent," Microsoft said in an e-mail to customers. "As a result, Microsoft must make available a revised version of these products with the allegedly infringing code replaced."
Allegedly?
What part of "decided in a court of law" does MS not understand?
Solution:
www.openoffice.org
Software patents suck, even when it's Microsoft that gets hit by them.
Heh. Not a problem for those of us running good old reliable Office 2000. It does way more than I'll ever need.Wanna bet MicroSloth jiggers Vista so the older versions of Office won't run?
Solution, as suggested above, openoffice.org.
How am I required to upgrade? I'm indemnified (protected) with what I have, so the upgrade is completely optional, it appears. Recommended, but optional.
Now, if this was open source code, which typically includes no warranty and passes legal liability on to the end users, then yes, you would be required to upgrade to avoid any personal legal liability for using the product.
It will really suck at my company. We have a lot of applications that are not compatible with XP Service pack 2. It is explicitly forbidden to upgrade our systems to SP2 for this reason. Wonder what management will do?
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