Some craven anti-sun people seem to have successfully started a rumour about openoffice being "more vulnerable" to M$ after the settlement with Sun. Nothiing could be farther from the truth. As a matter of fact, the settlement changed nothing as far as the protection of OSS projects from M$ is concerned. Any company has the right to sue owners of an OSS project if it has a legitimate claim in terms of IP infringement. So, let's shut down the rumour mills once and for all as far as the settlement & open office are concerned. More on the settlement's implications on openoffice:
Danese Cooper of Sun on Openoffice: "I believe we would have loved to protect OpenOffice.org from future lawsuits by Microsoft in our settlement with them but F/OSS software is by definition a shared resource and we have no explicit control over all the elements of that community. The language of the settlement takes OpenOffice.org as an example and makes it clear that Microsoft reserves the right to bring suit against any F/OSS project against which it has a claim (whether or not the project is stewarded by Sun). This isn't really news, is it? Nothing has really changed, except that in our settlement with Microsoft we managed to get some protection for our brands."