The 4 year patent deal with Microsoft, obviously that covers things like SilverLight. The one that Microsoft don’t have to renew in 4 years leaving open source developers with something you’ve described as infringing and requiring patent coverage. The patent deal that isn’t compatible with the GPLv3 (as admitted by Novell in their SEC filings).

That’s probably the patent deal.

I’ve done my own research. That the company you work for has left the open source community and that you did a long time ago is my claim.

Am not sure what you are referring to about patents.. Perhaps some false claim propagated by the anti-OOXML camp.

OOXML is covered under the OSP. The only complain I have heard about the OSP is what would happen if future versions of OOXML were not under the OSP, a criticism that Microsoft has addressed (see Brian Jones blog for the announcement).

Not that it was a real issue in the first place, but one of the last things that some people clinched to.

Miguel.

This is a recollection from what I have read on the blogs and the OOo discussions, and not an authoritative account, so you might want to do your own research.

Novell and the JCA for OOo basically comes down to the fact that if we sign that, all of our code can end up in a proprietary application like Lotus Notes, with *none* of the improvements making it back to the open source community.

It is basically a copyright assignment, but we consider that the amount of work that we do in this area is large enough that it *should* remain open source and that all of us using the OOo codebase should be on an equal footing, and IBM should not be the only one with special privileges.

So our changes are public, they are under the OOo license, and free for anyone to take (pretty much every Linux distro does), as long as they give back.

As for my comments about Novell, you are miss representing my comments. Novell continues to be one of the most active contributors to the open source community, and if you use the open source desktop, you are benefiting every day from all the work and effort that we pour into it.

Miguel.