Microsoft May Indemnify Some Red Hat Linux Users

[Tim]

On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 15:17 -0700, Guy Fraser wrote:
> As far as I can tell the only bits they can fight about is the
> intellectual property they used for the specific parts that are
> required to make Samba, Mono and OpenOffice compatible with the MS
> counterparts. Even though the SW may have been completely written from
> scratch to emulate the required functions, some reverse engineering
> was likely required to determine how to create the functions. Any
> reverse engineering is against the MS EULA, so they could argue that
> some impropriety had occurred that enabled those functions to be
> created and therefore those functions may be in violation of some
> statute under the laws of some jurisdictions.

I would have thought that easy enough to circumvent.

e.g. To reverse engineer a Word doc, I don't need to buy Microsoft Word,
I can use the documents that someone else has created.  I've never had
to agree to their EULA, under those circumstances.

Likewise, I can reverse engineer against someone else's file server.  I
don't recall reading any conditions in a EULA that says I can't allow
someone else to use *my* data, or vice versa.

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