Horny Jo’s Daily Blog

whitehartstag writes with a link to a Network World article about statements from Xandros in the wake of their Microsoft deal. Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos made a point of stating that they don’t believe their product violates any of Microsoft’s patents. Nor, he said, did the software giant share with them exactly which patents they believe Linux violates. Just the same, he’s disappointed with the reaction they’ve received from the open source community. “Feedback from the Linux community has been on the order of ‘you shouldn’t really be talking to the devil.’ Linux and open-source advocates believe it is a big issue and say the Xandros deal, and another signed by Novell with Microsoft last year, erodes open source licensing provisions especially around intellectual property issues. Indeed, the Free Software Foundation is rewriting its GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0 to prohibit such patent deals in the future.”

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AlexGr sends us to Todd Bishop’s blog in the Seattle PI for news that Microsoft has brought someone aboard to serve as its Director of Linux Interoperability and head up the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab. “…his name will be familiar to people in the open-source community. In an e-mail late Thursday night, a Microsoft representative said the role will be filled by Tom Hanrahan, who was most recently the director of engineering at the Linux Foundation, the group created through the recent combination of the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Development Labs.”

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