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indemnification != patent license/covenantindemnification != patent license/covenantPosted Nov 28, 2006 4:37 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421)In reply to: Novell's IRC session on the Microsoft deal by drag Parent article: Novell's IRC session on the Microsoft deal Indemnification is a promise that they will fight the patent for you, or at least cover the fines if they lose and have to stop distributing under the GPL. This is quite different from purchasing a restrictive patent license (excuse me, a "covenant not to sue"), since the latter means that they are not going to fight the patent but want to distribute the GPL software anyway. I'm assuming Moglen is working on a wording for GPLv3 that will allow indemnification, for a fee, in the same way that warrantees may be offered for a fee, but prohibits restrictive patent licensing by any name.
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Novell != Novell's customers Posted Nov 28, 2006 8:27 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] Novell itself is NOT covered by any license or covenant. So how could they not fight the patent and distribute the GPL software anyway?
It's customers don't have to fear Microsoft, but Novell does, same as ever. So Novell still has every reason to avoid Microsoft's patents.
Novell != Novell's customers Posted Nov 28, 2006 12:51 UTC (Tue) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link] Exactly. It is Novell's policy to never ship infringing code. Never has been, never will be. SUSE, Ximian and the rest of the Novell OSS engineering will never introduce "patent bombs"; we're still the same good guys as we've always been. We'll treat any known "infringement" a bug and fix it.
I really don't get how people come up with this strange idea. Gedankenexperiment time: Don't you think, even if it _were_ true, it would be kinda obvious if suddenly MS sued someone for a patent infringement introduced by a Novell engineer from now on? Do you really think this would stand _any_ chance in court? With those anti-trust and conspiracy guns focused on MS/Novell right now?
Nothing has changed. Code from Novell engineers is not unsafe; if anything, it is safer than before. And we got a lot more cash to spend on development of OSS code now.
Software patents are still bad and need to disappear, or at least radically reformed (and I think you'll eventually see even more activity in this direction as well); because the real threat are still the patent troll companies.
A patent troll injecting code via a malicious or even unsuspecting independent developer is much more low-key; that's the much better conspiracy theory, you know.
And even then: The code would simply be ripped out and rewritten. Linux goes on.
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