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Novell Injects MS Lawsuit Exploit Into Open Office
F.M. Petain writes, "It looks like Microsoft's first move in the 'Linux owes us' game is to move a Pawn. A few days ago, a Novell programmer, Noel Power, submitted patches to add VBA compatibility to Open Office's spreadsheet module. This is great for people trying to convert the business desktop from closed source to open source, but is this gift really a ticking time bomb? What happens when Microsoft declares that the VBA code was stolen?" The patches may have been submitted only a few days ago, but the code must be considerably older; the article claims that nine distros in adition to SUSE already support the VBA extensions in their versions of Open Office. (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)
the open source community has no way of validating code, and blindly accepts any code offered, assuming that there's no patent infringing code in it.
Of course it hasn't. Are you willing to pay the lawyers? Patents are stupid and most of OSS developers just ignore it, because if we cared about respecting patents we would need to shut down most of the OSS software.