On the other hand, Novell rightly points to another page of the contact, which lists five categories of assets that are to be "excluded" from the deal. Three of the first four categories concern NetWare products -- a software business that Novell was unquestionably retaining control of -- while the fifth says "all copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare."
Of course, how he goes on to claim that there is any ambiguity in the contract is a mystery to me.
And therein lies the most difficult aspect of the 10 million distribution model. I run Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and occasionally a Fedora release now. Though I once ran SUSE, Mandrake & Gentoo I haven't in some time and thus have no idea what they look like these days. It's just impossible to stay up on all of these variations unless you run distrowatch.com or have oodles of free time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact of the current state of Linux. As a result we just stick with what we are used to and (mostly) satisfied with rather than checking out each new distribution, which is really the same reason people stay with Windows. So really I can't blame Linus for not knowing what Debian is like these days.
It just seems to me that if MS were interested on promoting this plugin it would be available or at least mentioned on their own website. Putting it on sourceforge may be a play to appeal to the open source crowd, but it seems less than sincere to me.
Sun has made a plug in for MS Office available, and I believe there is a similar product on sourceforge (naturally), but Microsoft does not include ODF support natively in Office 2007 nor is there a download available on their site.
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He actually did include that exception in TFA:
On the other hand, Novell rightly points to another page of the contact, which lists five categories of assets that are to be "excluded" from the deal. Three of the first four categories concern NetWare products -- a software business that Novell was unquestionably retaining control of -- while the fifth says "all copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare."
Of course, how he goes on to claim that there is any ambiguity in the contract is a mystery to me.
And therein lies the most difficult aspect of the 10 million distribution model. I run Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and occasionally a Fedora release now. Though I once ran SUSE, Mandrake & Gentoo I haven't in some time and thus have no idea what they look like these days. It's just impossible to stay up on all of these variations unless you run distrowatch.com or have oodles of free time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact of the current state of Linux. As a result we just stick with what we are used to and (mostly) satisfied with rather than checking out each new distribution, which is really the same reason people stay with Windows. So really I can't blame Linus for not knowing what Debian is like these days.
It just seems to me that if MS were interested on promoting this plugin it would be available or at least mentioned on their own website. Putting it on sourceforge may be a play to appeal to the open source crowd, but it seems less than sincere to me.
Sun has made a plug in for MS Office available, and I believe there is a similar product on sourceforge (naturally), but Microsoft does not include ODF support natively in Office 2007 nor is there a download available on their site.