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.)

Comments

Re:Poison pill

[kimvette]

FWIW, I run SuSE (retail) for most of my office machines and for my home machine. I also run CentOS and Ubuntu. Most of the machines are going to be upgraded to SuSE 10.2. Say what you will, but not everyone is going to dump SuSE until there is a good reason to. We might go OpenSUSE this time around rather than pay for the distribution, depending on what is tainted in SuSE Retail. Given the timing, I doubt SuSE 10.2 is tainted with anything from Microsoft at this point. That might change in SuSE 10.3 or SuSE 11. Given how slowly Microsoft tends to move, it's possible that even next autumn's release won't be tainted at all with their crud.

If you're running SuSE already (10.1 or earlier) there is little reason to dump what you have, but keep your options open and reevaluate the larger distributions periodically. Given the refinement of KDE in SuSE, I'm reluctant to dump it even for kubuntu.