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.