Microsoft/Novell Partnership

[E K]

What if you buy SuSe and pass it on to some one else? or is SuSe licenced per copy as M$ Windows and you can not pass it on to some one else? Can the person you gave SuSe to use those technologies that you are able to use (specially those that are bundled with the CD, which I assume will include the useful ones)?

I didn't understand that SuSe customers can use windows software without buying them or any other software in windows per se. I understood him as saying that if you are a Novell customer then you can run perl on windows or use mount vista file system on Linux, play window media player files with DRMs, stuff like that. Stuff which are technically possible to do but MS licencing prohibit you.

EK

Ian Petersen <ispeters-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote: On 11/3/06, E K  wrote:
> What I didn't understand is that Balmer is saying the Windows/Linux
> interoperability technologies will apply only to SuSe and not to other Linux
> distros. How does that sit with GPL? I see SuSe to be murky. You are in a
> territory that is neither proprietary nor open source.

My understanding of Ballmer's "but only Suse customers" comment was
that Microsoft is only going to allow Suse customers to freely use
Microsoft's patents.  (This all assumes that Suse includes software
that infringes on some of Microsoft's patents, which is unclear to
me.)  I don't think that's murky.  By buying something from Suse, the
purchase now includes the rights to Microsoft's "IP".  By not buying
anything from Suse, you haven't got the opportunity to get access to
Microsoft's "IP" (unless you go ask Microsoft yourself, or get access
some other way).  The GPL, and open source in general, doesn't enter
into the picture, from my understanding.

Ian

-- 
Tired of pop-ups, security holes, and spyware?
Try Firefox: http://www.getfirefox.com
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists


 		
---------------------------------
The best gets better. See why everyone is raving about the All-new Yahoo! Mail.  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20061103/3f091917/attachment.html>