Published at LXer:

The first fruit of the recently announced Novell/Microsoft interoperability agreement arrived on Dec. 4, with Novell's announcement that its version of the OpenOffice productivity suite will now support the Microsoft Office Open XML format.

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I've got a nasty feeling about all this MS/Novell stuff...

I saw the note in the INQ. I got a mixture of feelings about this.... none of them of aproval

So, are they saying that they are now incorporating Microsoft IP into an open source product? Even if that particular Microsoft IP is "open source" for now, it doesn't strike me as a wise idea. Getting Microsoft code of any description intertwined with open source code is probably what Microsoft wants so they can claim all of it is based on their IP later and threaten to sue if everyone does not pay up.

PS: I understand that OpenOffice already accesses Microsoft formats (.doc, .xls, ...) so it may be too late to worry about that now.

But OpenOffice has had that for a long time, hasn't it? As in, before the whole deal with MS's open source stuff.

So what?
From now on MS can say that the new OpenOffice versions include their IP and have breached a list of patents and copyrights or something. The Vole can do some really nasty tricks in order to blew the competition apart. But not this time, not with the open source community. Have you ever heard the strategy called "Embrace, extend and extinguish"?