Slashdot Mirror

If you really think that peace exists within the FOSS development community, maybe you should spend some time reading about the recent internal conflicts that have been plaguing both the Debian and Gentoo projects.

Passion can be scary -- anyone who's stood at an altar to be married can tell you that. Passion is a powerful motivator for a lot of things, including innovative problem solving. Yes, passionate people who care about their work can engage in strident discussion. Should it rise to the necessary level, alliances will form and there will be yet another fork. Customers, especially business customers, need not be afraid of this process - X.org teaches us that often a fork brings clarity and cohesion to a passionate team and outstanding results are almost immediately forthcoming.

Disagreements in the secret back room deals process, however, are something businessmen need to fear. They can lead to warring law firms, legal liabilities, and injunctions against almost any non-open technology that a company has leveraged to compete effectively. This can bring multinational firms to a halt, prevent essential communications for emergency personnel, or completely break a supply chain overnight. These are not minor risk at all. These are bet-the-company risks. Every business school teaches the same mantra: "risk is essential to good business. Embrace risk. But do not bet the company."

To bring this back on topic, there is a course of action Novell can pursue that will eventually bring them absolution. Microsoft demonstrated this technique in their deal with Sendo. Basically their deal involved providing the OS for the Sendo phone. If the product failed to launch by a set date for any reason, including Microsoft's inability to deliver the OS, the terms of the deal resulted in Microsoft ownership of all of Sendo's phone related IP. Unsurprisingly, Sendo is no more. Also unsurprisingly, other phone vendors are reluctant to reap the benefits of partnering with the PC software market leader.

Novell can deliver the goods - developing C# and Mono, Visual Basic for Open Office for the Linux platform. They can leverage the economics of overseas labor markets to hire an army of paralegals to document in the source code specifically by number (or more subtly with easily searchable keywords) which patents are violated. They can identify leaky workers and assign them to positions of responsibility, identifying them anonymously to L'inq. They can make the project their organizational strategy lab and send a new manager (or better yet, a failed engineer) to reorganize it every 90 days. They can hire Scott Adams as a motivational speaker. Site security can be overseen by the cousin of the accountant that does the inventory, who is the Aunt of the payroll accountant who is the cousin of the head of HR who seems not to notice that the majority of employees exist only in the payroll. This is the customary practice in Banaglore anyway - everybody is related to everybody else and if you can't indulge in a little nepotism how important could you be? Since failure is not only the expected, but the desired outcome, the place can be a plush corporate retreat where junkets by excecutives can be organized for minimal oversight and maximum recreation where it is understood that inspection tours will only be a strictly scheduled and carefully guided interlude between morning golf and discussion with open bar. They can dogfood the heck out of the thing, insisting that pre-alpha tools be used for management, production and accounting. When their committed investment is gone, they can appeal for more cash (bleed the beast!) or just shrug and say it's not their fault - offshoring wasn't guaranteed and it just didn't work - but see what strides

Let's look at how they dealt with Sendo, a company that partnered with them to help them get into the clubby smartphone biz, ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts _masterplan_to_screw_phone/ ):

In fact, this SDMA turns out to have been Sendo's death warrant. As the company explains: "Under the SDMA, in the event of a Sendo bankruptcy, Microsoft would obtain an irrevocable, royalty free license to use Sendo's Z100 intellectual property, including rights to make, use, or copy the Sendo Smartphone to create other to create other Smartphones and to, most importantly for Microsoft, sublicense those rights to third parties."

Now doesn't all the paranoia start to make sense? This is how they are reported to treat their friends. Now after you can't get their web page at http://www.sendo.com/ to load, check out their article on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendo .

This already exists if you've gotta cool smartphone!
Checkout the SendoX accessories and click on the little picture of the keys at the top. :) The keyboard works really well and is great for text/email/general 'desk' use.
Steve/

No shock there. Everyone should have learned from Sendo that allowing MS access to the intellectual property they want, without a blood contract, is asking for trouble.

Strangely enough, Sendo is also reporting this.

... is that MS has realised that, without opening up in this way, WinCE doesn't have a hope in hell of making it onto phones.

Case in point: Sendo, who were the main UK manufacturer of WinCE-based phones, eventually gave up and switched to Symbian. One of the reasons behind the move was the release version of Stinger (WinCE for phones) getting later and later and playing havoc with their schedules.

It's worth noting, though, that there's still a lot of ugliness left over with the Sendo case, with suits and counter-suits going back and forth. Andrew Orlowski's piece in The Register contains many fascinating bits, but most interesting (and most applicable here) is that the main thing Sendo couldn't handle was their own code going back to MS to be incorporated into the OS, thus losing any competitive edge.

The new WinCE license demands such code returns. It shows they've learned their lessons about lawsuits, but maybe not about what their OEM customers actually want.

Sendo

I think Tablet PC's are aiming at a slightly different market to J2ME. Microsoft are competing against J2ME with their cut down version of Windows CE for mobile phones. But there's nothing to stop phones running this OS from running J2ME stuff as well.