[dundee] First legal suit from the SFLC

[gordon dunlop]

Hi All,
This is the first legal suit of the SFLC under the GPL version 2:
 
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS2535349507

I think this will be the start, especially in embedded Linux devices 
where a stripped kernel with specific applications is the only way to go 
for operating these devices to keep the costs down. They are not 
returning any modifications of the code or sometimes not even 
acknowledging the use of open-source code, I hope this litigation is 
successful. By the way I downloaded the IBM Lotus Symphony suite that is 
now open-source (built upon Open Office). It is good to see Big Blue 
joining the Open Office board and is committing 35 developers to the 
Open Office project with the aim of merging the best features of Lotus 
Symphony with Open Office. The download can be had from here:

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa

The only thing is that it requires a minimum of 1 GB of ram and is only 
supported on Fedora (Redhat) and SuSE (Novell) systems. You have to 
register and it does take a while to download (A lot of people must be 
downloading it), I used the secondary server rather than the primary 
server using http as their download manager does not work. I will try it 
on my Ubuntu partition (to see if it works O.K.), I want to try it as it 
is supposed to load any Microsoft document (exception of Office 2007) 
and will keep all formatting, apart from macros. I will test it out and 
let you know what I think, the acid test will be my wife's views as she 
is operating system agnostic and only wants things to work. First 
impressions is that it looks cool, but I will probably wake up to 
reality during the next week finding out what it can do and what it 
cannot do. I will use use both mine and my wife's dissertations written 
in Office 2003, with complex graphics, to see how it handles so if it 
can these documents maybe we can use this software without having to use 
Microsoft products anymore. I will give a report sometime.

Gordon