Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, Noel pointed me at this piece of what is (technically) known as the purest crap. Anyone who is at all confused can look at the relevant FAQ (Q4.) which I quote in full here:

Q4. With this agreement, will Novell include Microsoft patented code in its contributions to the open source community?

No. Novell will not change its development practices as a result of this agreement. It has always been our policy in all development, open source and proprietary, to stay away from code that infringes another's patents, and we will continue to develop software using these standard practices. If any of our code is found to infringe someone else's patents, we will try to find prior technology to invalidate the patents, rework the code to design around the infringement, or as a last resort remove the functionality.

Novell is committed to protecting, preserving and promoting freedom for free and open source software.

This is the basis that my team work on. The VBA compatibility functionality is just an extension of existing MS Office interoperability work. I suspect that the poster is a pre-gratuity equine dental examiner looking for custom. I mean, even the premise that VBA (a simple Basic) is in some way revolutionary, innovative or novel is rather a stretch. The nice piece this was based on, and is rather more interesting is OpenOffice.org Calc adds support for Excel VBA. Of course, if you like Deja-Vu you might want to read this after the Sun announcement in which the heebie-jeebies are going at them instead.
Another meme I've been reading recently in the Argh, everything is a trap ! vein is the myth of Microsoft infallibity: the argument goes something like this:
- Microsoft has never made a mistake
- => anyone making a deal with them will get shafted
- => we're all going to die
- => run around screaming.
While, for sure Microsoft has made some astute business decisions in the past, it has also been lucky in some cases - and also rather stupid in others. Of course, taking the infallibility argument to it's logical conclusion we should not even bother trying to compete with Microsoft, but all roll over & play dead. Anyhow - luckily I beg to differ, and present two counter examples, that I happen to remember:
- Sun & Java - Microsoft licensed Java, news.com writes:
  
  The germ of the suit began when Microsoft took out a Java license in 1996. Sun contended that Microsoft quickly began to run afoul of the licensing terms and filed the initial lawsuit in October 1997.
  
  So here we see Microsoft making a really stupid move, signing an agreement they couldn't keep, and probably didn't need, and what was the end game ? they got to buy themselves out of it for $20million, got a load of injunctions slapped on them, had to retro-fix their product etc.
- Lindows vs. Microsoft - the Wikipedia article is quite illuminating:
  
  As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $24 million cash (for a case that Microsoft itself brought), and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.
  
  And now of course, we all know the Windows & Office trademarks are indefensible, one rumour I heard had it that the settlement itself was intended to be secret, but SEC regulations mandated disclosure & this was missed by the MS lawyers.
Unfortunately the myth of MS infallibility is rather useful to them in a market where leadership is critical, and can move the market.
Got to the mail queue, submitted another patch to CleverAge, seemingly they merged my last lot of changes, nice. Lunch, IM chat overlapped with the team meeting (sadly).
Rushed to train station, call with Florian. Worked on the train, got to 'Walkabout' - an interesting hotel, but cheap - dinner, reading The Hiding Place (Corrie Ten-boom), more demo prep in the evening.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2006-11-21: Tuesday