The CA Supreme court, who job it is to interpret the CA constitution, found that denying same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Simply disagreeing with them doe snot that they made law by judicial fiat. Attack the ruling if you wish. They did make their arguments available. Refute them based on the CA constitution and prior CAS rulings.
As for "democracy": The CA amendment process allows the CA constitution to be changed by a minority of eligible voters as was the case in Prop 8 where only 29.5% of eligible voters made a change to the constitution. That's not democracy, no matter what the subject matter of the ballot was or is.
Everyone was treated equally under miscegenation laws as well. Everyone could marry someone of the same race. If you preferred someone of a different race, well, "having your preferences catered to by the state isn't something you can count on when you are a distinct minority."
That "majority of voters" is such hogwash. The CA constitution was amended by amended by a *minority* of voters, not a majority. Voters are those are eligible to vote not just those who actually cast a vote on a particular ballot.
At the time of Prop 8, CA had 23,208,710 eligible voters. Of those only 6,838,107 actually voted to change the constitution. That's only 29.5% of actual voters. The process is a crock whether Prop 8 passed or not. Something as fundamental as a constitution should not changeable by a minority. Such a process can and will be abused.
Note that the US constitution cannot be changed in this manner. It requires 2/3 of *all* eligible members of Congress and 3/4 of *all* states to explicitly vote yes, not just those who decide to case a vote. Any vote not cast is effectively a No.
The framers of the US Constitution were much smarter and required an absolute super-majority of those eligible to make such fundamental changes.
Your argument has a serious, fundamental flaw. I could possibly agree with it except that it is not applied across the board to all individuals, but instead singles out homosexuals. Please explain how an infertile heterosexual couple qualifies, and yet an infertile homosexual couple does not? Either couple requires third party help to obtain children and yet you accord the children of infertile heterosexuals as worthy of societal benefits and the children of infertile homosexuals are unworthy. Are the homosexuals children not part of the future society?
You claim to not oppose adoption by homosexuals, but deny those children the protections marriage affords. It seems you care far more for what kinds of sexual organs the parents have than the actual children.
You have a strange definition of overwhelming. In CA, prop 8 passed with 52%. That is called barely making it, not overwhelming. It's actually even worse than that. According to the CA Secretary of state, only 72% of eligible voters actually voted. That means that the CA constitution was actually altered for *everyone* by only 52% of 72% = 37.44% of actual eligible voters. That's very, very far from overwhelming.
The whole idea of amending a constitution with only a simple majority of cast votes is a crock. Note, that is not a simple majority of the electorate, just a simple majority of votes cast in a single election. If only three people voted, two would be enough to change the constitution for all. Pretty scary, really. Such a process begs to be abused.
That is one reason the founding fathers weren't stupid when they required 2/3 of both houses of Congress to pass an amendment, not just 2/3 of those who actually vote. Also, its 3/4 of *all* the states, not just 3/4 of those who vote. Any non-vote is considered the same as No.
Changing constitutions should be *hard* and require by-in by at at least a super-majority of *eligible voters*. If you can't get that many to turn out for an amendment, it doesn't rate passing. Like the US constitution, an absent vote should equal No (not just Prop 8 either, it doesn't matter what the subject matter is)
Good, I am glad that some of the details are being documented.
No you are not, you have not got the slightest interest in implementing this specification regardless of whether it is fully documented or not. This is simply a game that the Slashdot community is playing.
Sigh. If it was fully documented it would be different. Look at the spec. Look at the ECMA TC45 committee charter and scope which states that OOXML must be fully compatible with the formats used in Microsoft Office. How much clearer can it be that this standard is just for Microsoft?
The real issue is that people think they can force government IT depts to stop using word by preventing OOXML being declared an ISO standard.
This argument is too funny. Word has been forced on countless numbers of people simply because it was the only way to reliably read.DOC files. I guess that is perfectly OK though.
OOXML does nothing to improve that. It would merely grant Microsoft even more control than they have now. Microsoft defines the standard.
ODF is vendor neutral. I want a format that is not controlled by any single company. How about not being forced to use Word?
I oppose this because I don't like the idea of top down dictators deciding what tools people use. This is not about free choice for the user, its all about ramming Open Office down the government employees throats whether they want it or not.
You think there is free choice now? Please.
That is not what standards are for. If a tool is good there is no problem getting people to use it. The Mozilla folk have no problem getting people to use their product voluntarily.
In itself a standards designation, particularly an ISO designation means absolutely nothing. OOXML has an ECMA designation, that is plenty. There is not a single IETF Internet standard that has an ISO designation although this is possible in theory. All an ISO designation means is that people have to pay for the standard in future. Thats the same whether its OOXML or ODF that gets an ISO designation, transfer of the copyright is a mandatory part of the process.
Microsoft has stated that they feel no obligation to actually follow the ECMA standard. Indeed, the whole thing is merely a farce.
The Burton Group responses are a joke. Are you sure you actually read them? To them, Microsoft can do no wrong.
It is completely disingenuous of them to go on and on about Sun controlling ODF and make no mention at all of Microsoft's control of OOXML. The ECMA TC45 committee charter explicitly stated (and the scope still does) that the OOXML standard had to be fully compatible with the file formats used in Microsoft Office. If that's not total control, then what is?
The OASIS TC for ODF had no such provision in their charter. There were and are no artificial application dependencies in ODF.
I fully expect Novell to change their version of OpenOffice.org to use as the default format OOXML at some point. All focus at Novell seems to be on OOXML and not ODF. Even Novell's participation in the ODF TC at Oasis seems to *always* reference OOXML in some manner.
Artic Fox was the first thing I bought for my brand new, shiny Amiga 1000 back in '86. I went to a pawn shop and bought a boom box with aux input so I would have some stereo sound. Popped that floppy in and my brother and I amazed at the sound and graphics. It was great fun. I especially loved flying the missiles.:-)
I have planned and deployed thin clients across local and wide area networks and all have been successful. While the situations you describe can happen, they can be easily avoided with proper planning.
Your comment is not witty. It merely demonstrates profound ignorance about a disease that primarily affects non-homosexuals and non-drug-abusers worldwide.
ODF is *implemented* by Openoffice.org and is used as the default format. ODF is controlled by Oasis and the ODF technical committee.
Now, let's contrast OOXML and ODF:
Goals:
OOXML: "The goal of the Technical Committee is to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications within the Ecma International standards process which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats"
An odd statement, yes? Produce a standard compatible with itself? ?!? To understand this you have to go back to the formation of TC45 (the ECMA technical committee who created the ECMA OOXML standard). That goal refers to the formats used in Microsoft Office 2007. Note that *NO* other software is given consideration at all. Only Microsoft's.
ODF: The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:
1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text, preadsheets, charts, and graphical documents, 2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications, 3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document, 4. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools, 5. it should keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other, and 6. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted.
Note that compatibility with any particular piece of software, not even OpenOffice.org is *NOT* a goal. Software should implement the standard, not the other way around like OOXML.
All of the ODF TC minutes are publically available to all. This is not true of the OOXML TC.
Anyone, even regular individuals, can join Oasis (and indeed they have) and participate in the evolution of ODF. Only companies can join ECMA.
Which do you think is more open? I think the answer is pretty clear.
OOXML is supposed to be a *standard*, something that others can read an implement by reading the spec. Tags which simply say "do it like Word95 did" are completely useless to everyone *except* Microsoft since Microsoft is the only one who actually knows what what is means. That alone should disqualify it as an international standard.
"I would think that you could load one of these old docs, and save it as DOCX and it would look and print the same as before."
It might, but *only* if you are using Microsoft Office since only they know how it actually works. This is, of course, the intent. They want to appear to be open when in truth no one but them can effective implement the "standard".
I guess this just proves that if you have enough money you can always buy yourself some respectability. People won't concern themselves with how you got your money.
Here's a heartfelt thank you for all of the things you created for the Amiga. They gave me many enjoyable moments and I still appreciate them even after all these years.
The i740 was a very decent for corporate use. It was inexpensive, had stable drivers for both Windows *and* Linux, and had decent performance for everyday tasks. It worked well without muss or fuss. I would definitely call that decent.
It wasn't the greatest gamer's chip ever made for sure, but most tasks on a computer aren't games, especially in a business.
There has been *NO* hardware change. Apple is not going to modify or change the hardware of your mac in any way. The 802.11n support is enabled by a software change only.
Using your logic, if Apple released a new (wired) ethernet driver that supported the new WHIZBANG protocol which allowed it to talk to previously unsupported gadgets they would have to charge for it as well. More generically, any new feature which provided new function for the hardware would have to be charged for as well.
So, you think that Microsoft provides computing nirvana? Please. Microsoft's control of IT has placed us at least ten years behind where we should be. You obviously know little of computing history.
As for ODF, Microsoft choose *NOT* to participate in it's creation. Microsoft is a member of Oasis and actually had observers on the technical committee but choose not to participate. If ODF is deficient in supporting Microsoft technologies they have only themselves to blame.
I think it is much more logical that Microsoft preferred to implement a format that they alone controlled as opposed to working with others to define something everyone could use. After all, by their own admission, Microsoft has stated that OOXML was designed *specifically* to support only Microsoft products and indeed the charter for TC45 at ECMA specified that they were to create a "standard" that was fully compatible with the formats used in Microsoft Office 2007. Since Microsoft solely controls Office 2007, guess who controls this "standard"?
How is her interpretation wrong? Novell has for several years and still does maintain their own version of OpenOffice.org. Since it is not identical to the OpenOffice.org you get from www.openoffice.org that makes it a fork.
Of course, RedHat does the same thing. Most distributions do. The magnitude of the fork differs.
There is a real concern, however. If OOo moves to LGPL 3 (Sun actually controls this) and (L)GPL 3 does prohibit Novell/Microsoft-type deals then what will Novell do? Will it truly separate itself from the OOo codebase in order to preserve the GPLv2?
I get really annoyed by the "interoperability" argument of this deal. Interoperability with Microsoft has always meant and still means that you do things *their* way.
If Microsoft actually wanted to be interoperable with Linux they could do it anytime they wanted without any special deals with anyone. After all, Linux is open and everything they need is available for just a download.
Microsoft doesn't want to be interoperable with Linux. They do want Linux to be interoperable with Windows because that makes it easier for them to move people from Linux to Windows. Remember the Microsoft definition of interoperability above. Microsoft wants Linux to do things more like Windows.
I see very little interoperability effort coming from Microsoft, but I do see much effort from Novell to have Linux do things the Windows way. They have mono with it's *.exe and *.dll files and other Windows mechanisms.Now they are implementing OOXML. I don't see any Microsoft developers on that project, only Novell. Perhaps I just don't recognize them.
And please tell what this agreement accomplished for customers that a simple unliateral IP indemnification by Novell would not?
There are many other companies with patents that are far more litigious than Microsoft. Anyone of them could sue Novell's customers at any time and this deal provides NO protection at all.
A general IP indemnification provided by Novell would address those companies as well as Microsoft and requires no special deals, no royalties, and has no GPL issues.
Any customer with sense should prefer the indemnification to this deal.
I've so lost whatever respect I had for you. It makes me sad.:( I find your arguments to be completely disingenuous.
"Microsoft has been spreading FUD that Linux infringes MS IP for years -- nothing changed in that respect here."
What has changed here is that Novell, a Linux distributor, has tacitly endorsed Microsoft's FUD all the while saying they have admitted nothing. Please, just how stupid do think your customers are? Novell's actions speak far more accurately than its words.
A simple general indemnification clause should be all that is necessary to satisfy IP concerns for customers. No special deals are required. If Novell truly believes what they say about IP in Linux then the indemnification makes even more sense than a special IP deal with Microsoft. Yet Novell chose to tapdance around the GPL, a license that their Linux business depends upon.
While I didn't like RedHat's terms, it is not the same thing as what Novell has done. Nothing in RedHat's terms would stop you from actually running the software, it affected support only. Under the Novell deal, if I don't want to pay Novell then I am under threat of being able to use the software at all. Big difference.
I find the whole interoperability thing to be a joke. The is *NO* issue with being interoperable with Linux since everything is open. No special deals are required. Microsoft can make Windows more interoperable with Linux at will. They don't want to. This agreement is about making Linux doing things the "Windows Way(TM)" which is Microsoft's real definition of interoperability.
You did shoot yourself in the foot because OOo 1.1.5 can read OOo 2.0 format. Also, since 2.0 is free, there is no monetary barrier to simply updating to 2.0.
In my experience, it's even *more* important when using less popular hardware.
>In the real world, all the smart users have vendor support to take care of >this issue for them. As linux popularity grows, the number of people using >a non-vendor kernel shrinks. A tiny minority of linux boxes run Linus' >tree.
Oh please. Smart users have nothing to do with it at all. Vendor support for drivers is generally poor, especially for older, no-longer-in-production hardware. They simply don't care about it anymore. You get told that the new hardware will fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
The CA Supreme court, who job it is to interpret the CA constitution, found that denying same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Simply disagreeing with them doe snot that they made law by judicial fiat. Attack the ruling if you wish. They did make their arguments available. Refute them based on the CA constitution and prior CAS rulings.
As for "democracy": The CA amendment process allows the CA constitution to be changed by a minority of eligible voters as was the case in Prop 8 where only 29.5% of eligible voters made a change to the constitution. That's not democracy, no matter what the subject matter of the ballot was or is.
Everyone was treated equally under miscegenation laws as well. Everyone could marry someone of the same race. If you preferred someone of a different race, well, "having your preferences catered to by the state isn't something you can count on when you are a distinct minority."
That "majority of voters" is such hogwash. The CA constitution was amended by amended by a *minority* of voters, not a majority. Voters are those are eligible to vote not just those who actually cast a vote on a particular ballot.
At the time of Prop 8, CA had 23,208,710 eligible voters. Of those only 6,838,107 actually voted to change the constitution. That's only 29.5% of actual voters. The process is a crock whether Prop 8 passed or not. Something as fundamental as a constitution should not changeable by a minority. Such a process can and will be abused.
Note that the US constitution cannot be changed in this manner. It requires 2/3 of *all* eligible members of Congress and 3/4 of *all* states to explicitly vote yes, not just those who decide to case a vote. Any vote not cast is effectively a No.
The framers of the US Constitution were much smarter and required an absolute super-majority of those eligible to make such fundamental changes.
Your argument has a serious, fundamental flaw. I could possibly agree with it except that it is not applied across the board to all individuals, but instead singles out homosexuals. Please explain how an infertile heterosexual couple qualifies, and yet an infertile homosexual couple does not? Either couple requires third party help to obtain children and yet you accord the children of infertile heterosexuals as worthy of societal benefits and the children of infertile homosexuals are unworthy. Are the homosexuals children not part of the future society?
You claim to not oppose adoption by homosexuals, but deny those children the protections marriage affords. It seems you care far more for what kinds of sexual organs the parents have than the actual children.
You have a strange definition of overwhelming. In CA, prop 8 passed with 52%. That is called barely making it, not overwhelming. It's actually even worse than that. According to the CA Secretary of state, only 72% of eligible voters actually voted. That means that the CA constitution was actually altered for *everyone* by only 52% of 72% = 37.44% of actual eligible voters. That's very, very far from overwhelming.
The whole idea of amending a constitution with only a simple majority of cast votes is a crock. Note, that is not a simple majority of the electorate, just a simple majority of votes cast in a single election. If only three people voted, two would be enough to change the constitution for all. Pretty scary, really. Such a process begs to be abused.
That is one reason the founding fathers weren't stupid when they required 2/3 of both houses of Congress to pass an amendment, not just 2/3 of those who actually vote. Also, its 3/4 of *all* the states, not just 3/4 of those who vote. Any non-vote is considered the same as No.
Changing constitutions should be *hard* and require by-in by at at least a super-majority of *eligible voters*. If you can't get that many to turn out for an amendment, it doesn't rate passing. Like the US constitution, an absent vote should equal No (not just Prop 8 either, it doesn't matter what the subject matter is)
Good, I am glad that some of the details are being documented.
No you are not, you have not got the slightest interest in implementing this specification regardless of whether it is fully documented or not. This is simply a game that the Slashdot community is playing.
Sigh. If it was fully documented it would be different. Look at the spec. Look at the ECMA TC45 committee charter and scope which states that OOXML must be fully compatible with the formats used in Microsoft Office. How much clearer can it be that this standard is just for Microsoft?
The real issue is that people think they can force government IT depts to stop using word by preventing OOXML being declared an ISO standard.
This argument is too funny. Word has been forced on countless numbers of people simply because it was the only way to reliably read
OOXML does nothing to improve that. It would merely grant Microsoft even more control than they have now. Microsoft defines the standard.
ODF is vendor neutral. I want a format that is not controlled by any single company. How about not being forced to use Word?
I oppose this because I don't like the idea of top down dictators deciding what tools people use. This is not about free choice for the user, its all about ramming Open Office down the government employees throats whether they want it or not.
You think there is free choice now? Please.
That is not what standards are for. If a tool is good there is no problem getting people to use it. The Mozilla folk have no problem getting people to use their product voluntarily.
In itself a standards designation, particularly an ISO designation means absolutely nothing. OOXML has an ECMA designation, that is plenty. There is not a single IETF Internet standard that has an ISO designation although this is possible in theory. All an ISO designation means is that people have to pay for the standard in future. Thats the same whether its OOXML or ODF that gets an ISO designation, transfer of the copyright is a mandatory part of the process.
Microsoft has stated that they feel no obligation to actually follow the ECMA standard. Indeed, the whole thing is merely a farce.
The Burton Group responses are a joke. Are you sure you actually read them? To them, Microsoft can do no wrong.
It is completely disingenuous of them to go on and on about Sun controlling ODF and make no mention at all of Microsoft's control of OOXML. The ECMA TC45 committee charter explicitly stated (and the scope still does) that the OOXML standard had to be fully compatible with the file formats used in Microsoft Office. If that's not total control, then what is?
The OASIS TC for ODF had no such provision in their charter. There were and are no artificial application dependencies in ODF.
I fully expect Novell to change their version of OpenOffice.org to use as the default format OOXML at some point. All focus at Novell seems to be on OOXML and not ODF. Even Novell's participation in the ODF TC at Oasis seems to *always* reference OOXML in some manner.
It's sad really.
Artic Fox was the first thing I bought for my brand new, shiny Amiga 1000 back in '86. I went to a pawn shop and bought a boom box with aux input so I would have some stereo sound. Popped that floppy in and my brother and I amazed at the sound and graphics. It was great fun. I especially loved flying the missiles. :-)
I have planned and deployed thin clients across local and wide area networks and all have been successful. While the situations you describe can happen, they can be easily avoided with proper planning.
Your comment is not witty. It merely demonstrates profound ignorance about a disease that primarily affects non-homosexuals and non-drug-abusers worldwide.
ODF is *implemented* by Openoffice.org and is used as the default format. ODF is controlled by Oasis and the ODF technical committee.
Now, let's contrast OOXML and ODF:
Goals:
OOXML: "The goal of the Technical Committee is to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications within the Ecma International standards process which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats"
An odd statement, yes? Produce a standard compatible with itself? ?!? To understand this you have to go back to the formation of TC45 (the ECMA technical committee who created the ECMA OOXML standard). That goal refers to the formats used in Microsoft Office 2007. Note that *NO* other software is given consideration at all. Only Microsoft's.
ODF: The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:
1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text, preadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
4. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools,
5. it should keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other, and
6. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted.
Note that compatibility with any particular piece of software, not even OpenOffice.org is *NOT* a goal. Software should implement the standard, not the other way around like OOXML.
All of the ODF TC minutes are publically available to all. This is not true of the OOXML TC.
Anyone, even regular individuals, can join Oasis (and indeed they have) and participate in the evolution of ODF. Only companies can join ECMA.
Which do you think is more open? I think the answer is pretty clear.
OOXML is supposed to be a *standard*, something that others can read an implement by reading the spec. Tags which simply say "do it like Word95 did" are completely useless to everyone *except* Microsoft since Microsoft is the only one who actually knows what what is means. That alone should disqualify it as an international standard.
"I would think that you could load one of these old docs, and save it as DOCX and it would look and print the same as before."
It might, but *only* if you are using Microsoft Office since only they know how it actually works. This is, of course, the intent. They want to appear to be open when in truth no one but them can effective implement the "standard".
I guess this just proves that if you have enough money you can always buy yourself some respectability. People won't concern themselves with how you got your money.
Here's a heartfelt thank you for all of the things you created for the Amiga. They gave me many enjoyable moments and I still appreciate them even after all these years.
:-)
I salute you!
The i740 was a very decent for corporate use. It was inexpensive, had stable drivers for both Windows *and* Linux, and had decent performance for everyday tasks. It worked well without muss or fuss. I would definitely call that decent.
It wasn't the greatest gamer's chip ever made for sure, but most tasks on a computer aren't games, especially in a business.
There has been *NO* hardware change. Apple is not going to modify or change the hardware of your mac in any way. The 802.11n support is enabled by a software change only.
Using your logic, if Apple released a new (wired) ethernet driver that supported the new WHIZBANG protocol which allowed it to talk to previously unsupported gadgets they would have to charge for it as well. More generically, any new feature which provided new function for the hardware would have to be charged for as well.
So, you think that Microsoft provides computing nirvana? Please. Microsoft's control of IT has placed us at least ten years behind where we should be. You obviously know little of computing history.
As for ODF, Microsoft choose *NOT* to participate in it's creation. Microsoft is a member of Oasis and actually had observers on the technical committee but choose not to participate. If ODF is deficient in supporting Microsoft technologies they have only themselves to blame.
I think it is much more logical that Microsoft preferred to implement a format that they alone controlled as opposed to working with others to define something everyone could use. After all, by their own admission, Microsoft has stated that OOXML was designed *specifically* to support only Microsoft products and indeed the charter for TC45 at ECMA specified that they were to create a "standard" that was fully compatible with the formats used in Microsoft Office 2007. Since Microsoft solely controls Office 2007, guess who controls this "standard"?
How is her interpretation wrong? Novell has for several years and still does maintain their own version of OpenOffice.org. Since it is not identical to the OpenOffice.org you get from www.openoffice.org that makes it a fork.
Of course, RedHat does the same thing. Most distributions do. The magnitude of the fork differs.
There is a real concern, however. If OOo moves to LGPL 3 (Sun actually controls this) and (L)GPL 3 does prohibit Novell/Microsoft-type deals then what will Novell do? Will it truly separate itself from the OOo codebase in order to preserve the GPLv2?
I get really annoyed by the "interoperability" argument of this deal. Interoperability with Microsoft has always meant and still means that you do things *their* way.
If Microsoft actually wanted to be interoperable with Linux they could do it anytime they wanted without any special deals with anyone. After all, Linux is open and everything they need is available for just a download.
Microsoft doesn't want to be interoperable with Linux. They do want Linux to be interoperable with Windows because that makes it easier for them to move people from Linux to Windows. Remember the Microsoft definition of interoperability above. Microsoft wants Linux to do things more like Windows.
I see very little interoperability effort coming from Microsoft, but I do see much effort from Novell to have Linux do things the Windows way. They have mono with it's *.exe and *.dll files and other Windows mechanisms.Now they are implementing OOXML. I don't see any Microsoft developers on that project, only Novell. Perhaps I just don't recognize them.
And please tell what this agreement accomplished for customers that a simple unliateral IP indemnification by Novell would not?
There are many other companies with patents that are far more litigious than Microsoft. Anyone of them could sue Novell's customers at any time and this deal provides NO protection at all.
A general IP indemnification provided by Novell would address those companies as well as Microsoft and requires no special deals, no royalties, and has no GPL issues.
Any customer with sense should prefer the indemnification to this deal.
I've so lost whatever respect I had for you. It makes me sad. :( I find your arguments to be completely disingenuous.
"Microsoft has been spreading FUD that Linux infringes MS IP for years -- nothing changed in that respect here."
What has changed here is that Novell, a Linux distributor, has tacitly endorsed Microsoft's FUD all the while saying they have admitted nothing. Please, just how stupid do think your customers are? Novell's actions speak far more accurately than its words.
A simple general indemnification clause should be all that is necessary to satisfy IP concerns for customers. No special deals are required. If Novell truly believes what they say about IP in Linux then the indemnification makes even more sense than a special IP deal with Microsoft. Yet Novell chose to tapdance around the GPL, a license that their Linux business depends upon.
While I didn't like RedHat's terms, it is not the same thing as what Novell has done. Nothing in RedHat's terms would stop you from actually running the software, it affected support only. Under the Novell deal, if I don't want to pay Novell then I am under threat of being able to use the software at all. Big difference.
I find the whole interoperability thing to be a joke. The is *NO* issue with being interoperable with Linux since everything is open. No special deals are required. Microsoft can make Windows more interoperable with Linux at will. They don't want to. This agreement is about making Linux doing things the "Windows Way(TM)" which is Microsoft's real definition of interoperability.
You did shoot yourself in the foot because OOo 1.1.5 can read OOo 2.0 format. Also, since 2.0 is free, there is no monetary barrier to simply updating to 2.0.
>That's only true if you use popular hardware.
In my experience, it's even *more* important when using less popular hardware.
>In the real world, all the smart users have vendor support to take care of >this issue for them. As linux popularity grows, the number of people using >a non-vendor kernel shrinks. A tiny minority of linux boxes run Linus' >tree.
Oh please. Smart users have nothing to do with it at all. Vendor support for drivers is generally poor, especially for older, no-longer-in-production hardware. They simply don't care about it anymore. You get told that the new hardware will fix it.