[Novalug] Microsoft & Novell -- Ballmer gives his interpretation of the deal and its meaning

[Thomas R. Corbin]

	And this week a Microsoft employee was trying to reassure FLOSS developers 
that MS was really friendly and wanted to do right by FLOSS developers - as 
long as they aren't commercial, and that any comments Ballmer makes should be 
ignored, as most of MS is just great and friendly and open, and he just says 
any old thing and can be ignored.

	I think this employee just can't drown out speech like this from Ballmer.

On Friday, 17 November 2006 10:09 am, Chris Metzler escreveu:
> Yesterday morning, at a Professional Association for SQL Server "summit"
> in Seattle, Steve Ballmer commented some more about the deal with Novell.
> Of note are the following quotes:
>
> " . . .the fact that that product (Linux) uses our patented intellectual
> property is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on
> R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic
> benefit from our patented innovations.
>
> "And we agreed on a, we call it an IP bridge, essentially an arrangement
> under which they pay us some money for the right to tell the customer that
> anybody who uses Suse Linux is appropriately covered. There will be no
> patent issues. They've appropriately compensated Microsoft for our
> intellectual property, which is important to us. In a sense you could say
> anybody who has got Linux in their data center today sort of has an
> undisclosed balance sheet liability . . .
>
> ". . .to the degree that people are going to deploy Linux, we want Suse
> Linux to have the highest percent share of that, because only a customer
> who has Suse Linux actually has paid properly for the use of intellectual
> property from Microsoft."
>
> Transcript located here:
>
> http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/108806.asp?source=rss
>
> Thanks Novell.  Sigh.
>
> -c