From: Adam Flinton 

Rich wrote:

>    This is interesting.

Not as interesting as the fact that you're saying that MS is going to write
& distribute fixes for other people's proprietary products should the
EU do as MS is asking & let it bundle those products with windows.

> You now say that just by calling a product
> linux as in redhat linux 9 the publisher is absolved of responsiblity.

No I'm saying that the people who write & own the software produce the
fixes. Given you think anyone should be able to write fixes for other
people's software & then distribute them I wonder if it would be OK for
non-MS companies/people to write fixes for Windows & then to distribute
"fixed" versions of windows.

I had no idea that the MS licencing was so liberal as to allow that. Are
you sure you're not working for Richard Stallman?

> So, when sun sells solaris and includes code like gnome for which it
> doesn't own the copyright then sun is still resposible but if sun sells
> linux and includes gnome then sun is not responsible.  What a hoot!
>

Sun would be responsible for distributing the fixes. If the software is
under a liberal Open Source licence then Sun could write the fix &
contribute it to the main GNOME tree & if it was accepted then it could
distribute that.

However if the product was a closed source/proprietary product where Sun
didn't have the source code then it would be difficult both technically
& legally to change someone else's software & then distribute it.

Adam

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