Hello,

On 9/10/07, martin.schlan...@gmail.com <martin.schlan...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is odd.   Michael and I have discussed this topic extensively.   He
certainly would like clarification in various areas and more details in
some.   But Michael's criticism (or for that matter, the Novell OpenOffice
team working with that spec) seems to be incredibly different than the
laundry list of issues that pass as technical reviews in sites like Groklaw.

The difference is that the Novell-based criticism is based on actually
trying to implement the spec.   Not reading the spec for the sake of finding
holes that can be used in a political battle.

Finally, Michael sounded incredibly positive after the ECMA meeting last
month when all of their technical questions were either answered or added to
the batch of things to review.   I know you are going to say "The spec is
not owned by ECMA", well, currently the working group that will review the
ISO comments is at ECMA.

For another view at OOXML look at what Jody Goldberg (no longer a Novell
employee) has to say about OOXML and ODF from the perspective of
implementing both:

http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-qu...

I find it hilarious that the majority (not all) of the criticism for OOXML
comes from people that do not have to write any code that interacts with
OOXML.  Those that know do not seem to mind (except those whose personal
business is at risk because Microsoft moved away from a binary format to an
XML format, which I also find hilarious).

1) You're saying that people _will_ have patent problems - i.e.

First of all, am not aware of such Novell promise to "never ship code that
infringes MS patents".   You can not make such statement because for one,
the patent system is broken.   Novell statements are wildly different, they
are of the form "we do not believe that we infringe" and am sure they say
something along the lines of "we dont plan on infringing, and we plan on
removing infringing code".  But I am not aware of all the promises Novell
has made, and I can not comment on other parts of the organization.  If you
want an official answer, my personal blog on politics and poor attempts at
humor is not the place to get an official answer.  Contact Novell public
relations for that.

But you might be referring to the policy that we use for Mono, and I will be
happy to discuss those with you.   The policies are on our FAQ, so you might
want to read that before you post in panic again.

Moonlight does not have the same policy that Mono does in terms of us
working around to remove infringing code.   For one, we do not know what it
could be (that is how the patent system works) and two we have agreed and
have obtained permission from any patents that might exist in Moonlight to
implement it.   So our policy with Moonlight is different from Mono because
of the requirements of this task (see mpegla.com for your own amusement).

That being said, in neither case are we aware of infringements.   But like
with any software piece, every 100 lines of code infringe someone's broken
patent, there is just no way around that.

2) You're saying other distributors can't ship Moonlight legally (in

Am not sure where you get the idea that the "US" is the only place where
software patents exist.   Free software people are under the mistaken
impression that software patents are only a US thing, while many of the
stake holders are European companies.   The only difference is that in
Europe your "software patent" is written to describe a machine.   Law firms
will offer you a set of checkboxes to "port" your patent from the US-wording
to any other nation wording.   And the patents are enforceable in most
countries in the EU.   Not surprising, as the EU owns many of patents on the
media space.

We are obtaining covenants (from Microsoft) and patent licenses (from
MPEGLA, the consortium of American, European and Asian companies that own
the "media space") to be allowed to redistribute Moonlight with a minimal
risk to the end user.

I say "minimal risk" and not "risk free", because that is the nature of
software patents, we could be infringing a patent from some guy in Latvia
for walking a linked list.

So that is the approach that we are taking to distribute for commercial use
Moonlight, a plugin that operates in the media space: a patent rich and
incredibly profitable space for the patent holders.  The rights negotiated
will give anyone patent coverage, as long as it is downloaded from Novell.
Although I would like to fix the patent system, am not the one going to do
so.   It feels like boiling the ocean, and I have already done my share of
ocean boiling, feel free to pick the good fight.

I hope it's just a matter of you being too fast on the trigger and

Well, it certainly merits an extended explanation.  I have tried to
summarize some of the issues above media patents but the space is incredibly
complicated and no amount of one-liners can precisely describe the problems,
the limitations and all the special conditions attached to them.

The problem is that people think that the problem is as simple as "patents
bad" and everyone wrapping his virtual kafia around his head and running to
the streets yelling "death to patents" has no idea how complex the system is
and how little effect yelling has on actually changing anything.  If you
want to engage on a serious patent discussion, I would love to do so, but
you are going to need some legal training and get a lot more depth before we
can have a productive discussion.

If you're actually saying what it sounds like you're saying (see item

Well, I did not say that.   So you can put the Ventolin down and breathe.

Miguel.