Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft [LWN.net]

Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft

Posted Nov 4, 2006 10:50 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft by bojan
Parent article: Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft

Things are straightforward :

"Microsoft hereby covenants not to assert Microsoft Patents against each Non-Compensated Individual Hobbyist Developer (also referred to as “You”) for Your personal creation of an originally authored work (“Original Work”) and personal use of Your Original Work."

Meaning
1. You must not receive any compensation whatsoever for your code for the covenant to apply
2. It only applies for your personal use, distributing the result to someone else voids the covenant.

To allow code to trickle in SLES they won't sue you if you contribute to opensuse and the result ends in SLES. The protection does not extends to opensuse users of your code though

« Microsoft … covenants not to assert Microsoft Patents against each Individual Contributor … for Your distribution of Your … work … directly to openSUSE.org, but only if, … (i) Your… Work becomes part of … SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and (ii) You ensure … openSUSE.org, … do not receive any licenses, covenants or any other rights under any Microsoft intellectual property. »

(The covenant is actually more restrictive, I've only quoted the main part)

Read
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/community...
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/patent_ag...

and judge by yourself

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