Bill Moseley wrote:
> I just got off the phone with a lawyer from Microsoft and he says they
> want to buy the swish-e "technology" (his words) for "their own
> internal use".  I call bullshit -- I think it's just another MS attack
> on open source.  But, he also implied that swish-e might be infringing
> on MS-owned patents.  Nice threat.  The interesting thing, of course,
> it that the code is free for their use, but my guess is it's the name
> that they really want us to stop using.

Well, it sounds like either the person who contacted you has caught the 
April Fools bug, or you did :)

> So three questions:
> 
> 1) how much money should we ask for?  I have no idea what's
> reasonable.
> 
> 2) how should we distribute the money?  My idea is to just split it up
> for all members of the swish-e list (I already grabbed a current
> subscription list, so don't bother subscribing multiple addresses at
> this point).

I like this idea! And the answer to #1 depends on how many people are in 
the list :)

> 3) since the code is freely available, I could just repackage under a
> different name.  So what name should we use?  I wonder if we could use
> "mswish" just to piss them off, of it that would be too close to the
> existing name -- or one they might want to use.

And maybe mswish can have utf8 support :)

-- 
Michael Peters
Developer
Plus Three, LP