On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 18:05 +0000, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: > Even if it's a one-time payment royalty, it's a royalty on software > patents which implies respecting them. > > If this view from the result is incorrect, please tell me how it is so, > for this comes straight from Kroes's statements and Microsoft's > agreements.
I'm not sure that's correct - if the new foundation had paid money to Microsoft because of patents, surely there ought to be a patent license or similar to cover the developers? An NDA is just that - it's not a patent license, and it doesn't protect you from being sued over patents. Indeed, the correct title of the agremeent is: "Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program License Agreement (No Patents)" - http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/PFIF_agreement.pdf The payment is for access to the documentation. Call it trade secrets, or whatever, it doesn't really matter - patents don't really seem to come into it. Personally, if the documentation is good and correct, I think €10k is a bit of a bargain - I bet it would have cost Microsoft a lot more than that to put together, and I bet a number of companies have paid a lot more than that to gain access to it. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
