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.