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Novell Offers Linux Users Legal Indemnity
Anonymous Coward writes "Novell today said it intends to indemnify its enterprise Linux users against possible legal action by The SCO Group and/or others. According to eWeek Novell's new Linux Indemnification Program is designed to provide its SUSE Enterprise Linux customers with protection against intellectual-property challenges to Linux and to help reduce the barriers to Linux adoption in the enterprise.
Under the terms of the program, Novell will offer indemnification for copyright infringement claims made by third parties against registered Novell customers who obtain SUSE Enterprise Linux 8 after January 13, 2004, upgrade protection and a qualifying technical support contract from Novell or a Novell channel partner."
Novell is using this as a chance to get support contracts thrown in with this protection?
Let me guess:
Novell's trying to cash in on SCO's bad manners!
Well, you can't indemnify someone without contract of some sort, and buying and installign software with a EULA that has that clause would be a good way to do it.
But in all fairness I officially downgrade Novell from an alert level of Double Plus Good to Plus Good. The SCO alert level remains fixed at Double Plus Ungood. Verner's is still tasty. Further news as events warrant.
-Adam
We shouldn't celebrate just because indemnification is available and say it solves the problem. That SCO has created demand for such indemnification is already a big problem. And of course companies offering indemnification have a vested interest in creating more such demand. They're not doing anything bad by offering it, but neither is it completely in the interests of free software for everyone to jump on it. It's more complicated than that and we have to keep the issues clear.
Am I wrong, or would 95% of each $699 SCO license fee go to Novell, since they retain ownership of Sys V UNIX?
Theres something fishy going on with SCO and Novell, with Novell coming out of this smelling like roses - I have to wonder if this whole SCO sham is simply a way to boost Novell's image as ' a good guy' at the expense of a company that was insignificant and dying anyway (SCO).
Anyone else finding it difficult to understand these dealings?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Unfortunately, for the same reason that the folks over at SCO keep on yakking...public perception. At this time, there is less than a small chance that the SCO lawsuit will bear fruit as it exists now, but the folks driving the bus keep on spouting. The result? The price stays high, goes higher, doesn't drop as much as it could. When other PR comes to light, they suffer. At this moment, in after hours trading, they are down $1.32. All the stories linked to the pages where I get the SCO price are about indemnification and the OSDL defence fund. Investors on a stock like this can read the review and be rattled. Thus, the PR here will probably be countered tomorrow with more PR from SCO.
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
What happens if SCO wins? No one at the moment can say that they won't. If that happens Novell stands to loose A LOT of money from the indemnification alone. No business, especially not one as big as Novell would do something like this just to get a few extra upgrade sales from a few of their customers.
*shrug*
You gotta love how Forbes always get it wrong. This Forbes article by Reed Stevenson
quotes
SCO also warned companies that they must pay to use Linux, which is based on the proprietary Unix operating system, or face litigation.
Emphasis mine of course.
Where does Forbes hire their journalist from? The local high school.
If indemnification makes people more likely to adopt open source software in the short term, it is a good thing. Yes, it will suck for smaller software companies that can not afford indemnification, but as more companies realize that open source is not as scary as Microsoft wants them to believe, its usage will pick up dramatically. For large companies, the savings in software licensing fees could pay for all the legal representation they need to defend their open source usage and distribution. Once the SCO case falls apart and potential copycats realize that extorting money out of free software users is harder than it appeared at first, such lawsuits, along with the fear of being sued, will drop off.
So
must be laughable. Why else would there be all these indemnification announcements today? I figure Novell knows some things we don't (yet). I'm looking forward to the end of SCO.
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SCO has been saying for quite a while that companies should indemnify their users if everything thinks that SCO doesn't really have a case. Novell did it, albeit with some catches, which I think are completely reasonable. While Novell has been lauded as of late as the good guy (which I still think they are), it's important to remember that they are still a business, just spent a whole lot of money buying Ximian and SuSE and need to make money to keep going. Yeah - Linux is "free" and all that, but when a company like Novell puts their support behind it, there IS going to be a cost.
Right now, I would do an incredibly happy little dance.
Then I'd wait six months for the SCO thing to blow over.
Then I'd sue, for tiny, legally incoherent reasons, a large quantity of different Novell linux customers. The reasons would be randomly selected, and different in each case, and occationally perhaps be pumped through shell companies. But Novell, having offered legal indemnification, would have to research and respond to each one at great cost on its customers behalf. Then I'd just sit back, attempt to stall these cases as long as possible, and quietly drop every single one just before it actually got into a courtroom.
I'd piss money down the drain by doing so, but hey, I'd force Novell to piss as much or more away in the process-- and since I'd be Microsoft, I'd be able to afford this. Possibly to the point where Novell would take serious damage without me having to break a sweat. Meanwhile, Novell's Linux customers would inevitably be a bit spooked by this, and some number would ask Novell if they could use one of Novell's linux-free, more antiquated alternate products instead.
MS might not do this, and it might not really be something that is realistic from their viewpoint (since someone might notice them perofrming widespread abuse of the legal system, which might get them the dreaded 'vextatious litigant' label). But if you don't think that it's something they'd be WILLING to do, then you probably also believe that line about "It doesn't MATTER if the Xbox is staggeringly unprofitable! This isn't a trust-like, illegal, or maliciously anticompetitive action! They're just taking the sound business strategy of taking massive losses now so that someday later, the XBox-3 can be somewhat profitable (or perhaps the XBox-4)!"
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I think his main point, and I would agree, is that indemnification is only a short term solution to a short term problem. Once all this played out with SCO in court, indemnification will not be needed. If a company has enough faith that SCO is wrong, it is worth the risk to them for "insurance" policy to gain new customers. If the support contract isn't a good value by itself, then the temporary freebee of an indemnification clause will make little difference in their sales.
Obviously to any group that is not profit group distributing Linux (Debian, etc.) indemnification is not possible, but most people who use Debian aren't buying support contracts from anyone, at any price. Most Debian (or Gentoo, or Slackware...) users are more aware of the problem, and feel confident that SCO can't win because they have no claim. Its also a different culture, with a bigger focus on "free as in speech/beer", rather than "how will this generate profits and create jobs to grow the business" concerns.
Corporate users are different because decisions are made by committee, not a single hacker, and done for the benefit of shareholders, employees, managers and customers. They have entire departments for IT, and they are more interested in running stable, reliable, supported networks than cutting edge. The needs, culture and expectations are just different.
I have used RedHat for several years, and paid for the support, on a few servers. Their recent policies are forcing me to consider changing vendors. Indemnification alone would not get me to switch, but I can see how it is a benefit on alongside SuSe, a very popular corporate distro, and one that I am considering. If its "icing on the cake" and SuSe puts out the best _product_, and they are honest in how they market indemnification, then I see this as a good move to push Linux in the mainstream, by removing barriers in the marketplace, ie: concern over the future of Linux.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Because such actions reinforce stupid decisions by legal departments such as yours.
If it becomes standard that you cannot buy or use code without "indemnity" then you have made it impossible for an independent code writer to write a program and have people use it. This is irrelevant to open source, what you have pretty much said is that writing code is the realm of big business and that start-ups and free enterprise and just the desire to tell people about solutions you have figured out have become illegal.
This goes far beyond Linux. Linux is now being protected by big money interests in the same way Windows is. But the next genius grad student who writes the "Linux-killer" operating system is going to be out of luck, as everybody who he shows it to is going to say "but you have no idemnity, so I'm going to have to stick with Linux..."
Even people who think Linux is the end-all of software should realize that this means the death of applications for Linux from independent authors, since they cannot "idemnify" their code. And Windows fans should realize this means the death of all the Shareware and Freeware and open source software, and also the few remaining tiny software vendors, all of who cannot afford "idemnification" either.
I don't care if this action causes SCO to go bankrupt tomorrow, this is a bad precedent for Novell to do this.
I had a question regarding "derivative works" and googled "Xenix". Here's what I found:
Xenix
(Redirected from XENIX)
Xenix was Microsoft's version of UNIX for microprocessors. Microsoft called it Xenix because it could not license the "UNIX" name.
Microsoft purchased a license for UNIX 7th Edition from AT&T in 1979, and announced on August 25, 1980 that it would make it available for the 16-bit microcomputer market. Xenix was not sold directly to end users; Microsoft licensed it to computer manufacturers who then ported it to their systems. The first ports of Xenix were to the Zilog Z8001 16-bit processor.
Altos shipped a version for their computers early in 1982, Tandy Corporation shipped one for their 68000-based systems in January 1983, and Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) released their port to the Intel 8086 processor in September 1983.
Xenix varied from its 7th Edition origins by incoporating elements from BSD, and soon possessed the most widely installed base of any Unix flavor due to the popularity of the inexpensive x86 processor, even though the port created for Tandy computers proved to be more robust.
When Microsoft entered into an agreement with IBM to develop OS/2, it lost interest in promoting Xenix. Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO. However, Microsoft continued to use Xenix internally, submitting a patch to support functionality in UNIX to AT&T in 1987, which trickled down to the code base of both Xenix and SCO UNIX. Microsoft is said to have used Xenix on VAX minicomputers extensively within their company as late as 1992.
SCO released a version of Xenix for the Intel 286 processor in 1985, and following their port of Xenix to the 386 processor, a 32-bit chip, renamed it SCO UNIX.
What if......
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
here ya go Melinda Gates connection to SCO. Courtesy of GrokLaw