Opening that can of worms in the
courtroom could mean as much trouble for Microsoft as it does for anyone else.
Few individuals have been sued because of an association with Linux. However, the level of rhetoric
surrounding who might be sued has been raised substantially. In the alliance between Microsoft
and Novell (see Chapter 10 for details), the two companies agree not to sue each other??™s customers
for intellectual property rights violations. However, Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith had this to say
about how open source developers can avoid being sued by Microsoft:
24
Linux First Steps Part I
So Microsoft today is making two, I think, important commitments, or promises to different
groups of developers in the open source community. The first is a promise that
we won??™t assert our patents against individual, non-commercial, open source developers.
Who are these? These are individuals who are creating code, contributing code, they??™re
not being paid for that code, they??™re often working in the evenings or at home. They??™re
not creating it as part of their job, but they??™re acting in an individual non-commercial
way. The promise doesn??™t run to anybody who employs them, because after all, they??™re
not acting in the course of their employment.
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