Microsoft, Novell, and "Clone Product" Lawsuits

El_Oscuro writes "The MS/Novell deal specifically excludes patent protection for "clone products." In the agreement, a clone product is broadly defined as "a product (or major component thereof) of a Party that has the same or substantially the same features and functionality as a then-existing product (or major component thereof) of the other Party ... and that has the same or substantially the same user interface, or implements all or substantially all of the Application Programming Interfaces of the Prior Product." The text of the clone product definition subsections is very cumbersome to read, but it specifically mentions OpenOffice, Wine, and OpenXchange by name without asserting that they are necessarily clone products."

Comments

Re:Windows Clone?

[Miguel de Icaza]

"Besides, what "new computing concept" have they come up with?"

I think the ribbon interface in office 2007 is a great idea. I really find it useful they way it guesses the features you might need and presents them to you, exposing new capabilities previously buried in obscur submenus. It would be great to have something similar in abiword, someone should clone it for google-summer-of code.

mod doWn

[Anonymous Coward]

numbers continue new faces 4nd many