Novell Gets $348 Million From Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes, "Novell has published additional details about its agreements with Microsoft concerning Windows and Linux interoperability and patents. It seems the company is receiving an up-front payment of $348 million from Microsoft, for SLES subscription certificates and for patent cross-licensing. Microsoft will make an upfront payment to Novell of $240 million for SLES subscription 'certificates' that Microsoft can use, resell, or distribute over the term of the agreement. Regarding the patent cooperation agreement, Microsoft will make an up-front net payment to Novell of $108 million, and Novell will make ongoing payments totaling at least $40 million over five years to Microsoft."

Comments

Its' Not a Patent Deal.

[arthurpaliden]

Read the press release, it is not a patent deal, that would put them in violation of the GPL. Instead it is a conenant not to sue.

So if I understand correctly. Microsoft is admitting that their software violates some of Novell's patents.

However, instead of protecting themselves and their customers by doing a cross licensing deal with Novell, Microsoft is keeping themselves and their customers at risk by entering into a non binding revocable 'covenant ' instead.

I wonder how well this will sit Microsoft's shareholders knowing that this risk exists and it is not being addressed permanently when such an option exists.

Re:Its' Not a Patent Deal.

[Bruce Perens]

I read the form 8K on Edgar. Don't count on press releases.

The companies are paying each other for covenants not to sue. It's there in black and white. I don't see that this is any different from a license, and I don't see that a judge would be swayed that a covenant in this context is any different from a license.

It still sounds like a GPL violation to me. Now, we have to watch what FSF does. They own the C library that literally every program on Novell Linux uses. They have a reasonably strong case to enjoin Novell from distributing it, which would kill SuSE entirely. They have Red Hat to pay for the lawsuit.

Bruce

My bet

[WindBourne]

that this includes a deal to not persue much further the SCO case. While the feds may go after MS for their involvement with the shady deal with SCO, this is probably an early payoff to Novell to drop it. I just wonder if this allows Novell to go after Sun or did MS protect them as well?

Muahahahaahaha History Repeats Itself

[Orion Blastar]

Remember when Microsoft gave Apple $3XXM, and the Mac Vs. Windows lawsuits were settled? Chances are that Microsoft is now doing the same with Novell, and Novell still owns some patents for Unix that it did not sell to SCO, and Novell was a major player in the IBM vs. SCO lawsuit. Microsoft is just trying to CYA itself, because obviously Vista infringes on some Unix/Linux patents. This is just a way of Microsoft saying to Novell, we'll give you some money to save your company, like we did to Apple, if you promise not to sue us.

I wonder if there will be a SuSE version of MS-Office, like the OSX version of MS-Office created out of the Microsoft-Apple deal?

RTFA - it's obvious what is happening.

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell is in huge financial trouble. If you read the article, they are trying to negotiate with their major debtors to come to an agreement and continue payments. Wells Fargo and Citibank are calling two of their major loans out against Novell. Also note the rumors of layoffs, investigating other financial mishaps, and the late filings of their earnings. This is what causes many companies to start heading down the tubes. The whole Microsoft agreement is essentially Microsoft cashing in on Novell after they made some financial mistakes and need someone to bail them out of it. Just watch as Microsoft ends up having major influence in the direction of Novell. This isn't a bad thing though. It means there will still be two main players in the Linux Business market. It's Microsoft's way of also creating some feirce competition against Redhat. Not to mention Oracle has their sites on Redhat and are taking shots at them. The whole support agreement with Oracle deal is meant to take out Redhat's major market. With that and a soon to be beefed up financial stability of Novell and push for SLES, Redhat will had some hard roads to go through. It's no surprise that MS sided with Novell when they saw Oracle make their move against Redhat. Interesting times in major Linux vendors are ahead. It should be interesting to see how it all turns out.

Embrace and Extend

[Mr Bubble]

Maybe Microsoft thinks that they can gain a significant share of enterprise Linux installations with a distribution they control. Then, they will do their classic embrace and extend to use the leverage to their advantage.

Microsoft knows that no one ever got fired for buying IBM of Microsoft. IBM is pushing Linux and that doesn't help Microsoft. By providing a Microsoft-approved Linux, they can get a slice of the pie and out themselves into a position to do to Linux what they have tried to do with every other standard technology - embrace and extend it.

Fedora Will Never Compromise

[Laven]

Excerps from my blog post of November 3rd, the day that Novell sold their soul and betrayed the community for a little short-term safety.

As long as I work on the Fedora Project, Fedora will never compromise on the essential liberties of FOSS nor will it betray the community. But the price of liberty is not free, nor is it comfortable. And unfortunately, some "leaders" of our community are willing to compromise liberty for short-term convenience. I am disgusted by people like this, and by Novell's betrayal of the community today.

Novell has effectively traded Long-Term Liberty for Short-Term Safety.

Red Hat supports causes that matter like providing the original seed money for Creative Commons. Or being a key partner in the anti-software patent movement during the miraculous last-minute turnaround at the European Parliament last year. I am proud to be part of an organization that demonstrates such moral and ethical commitment.

But ultimately, Red Hat cannot change the world alone. That is why the Fedora Project exists. We want to enable the community to work together to improve FOSS at a rapid pace, in partnership with the large and consistent contributions from our engineers. We strongly believe that this is the most effective way for the entire FOSS movement to advance. Yes, we made some big mistakes in our community relationship earlier, but we are learning, and continue to improve at an ever accelerating pace.

For these reasons that I urge the FOSS community to support the Fedora Project through volunteer contributions of time and effort. Or if you lack time to contribute, please consider monetary donations toward any of the shared causes that we are fighting for.

http://wtogami.livejournal.com/11305.html
Please read more in the original version in this blog entry.

Warren Togami
Founder, Fedora Project
Software Engineer, Red Hat, Inc.

My conspriracy theory....

[f8l_0e]

Microsoft is not directly targeting Linux, but rather apps/utilities that might persuade users from switching to it. There are two things that Novell has that Microsoft would want to bury or pollute. Evolution and Xgl. Decent email/collaboration/task management software could help corporate users break away from Outlook; and Xgl makes Aeroglass effects possible on modest hardware. I have a feeling that we'll see these two projects either stagnate (from Novell's end), or newly added features might find themselves getting non GPL code in them. I suggest forking the code on both now.

Re:Are you trying to be funny?

[jchenx]

And why aren't these instructions on the wiki? because giving someone instructions to put into a console is much more concise, simple, and much more difficult to screw up than guiding them through a GUI.

Again, you still don't get it. That type of attitude is precisely why a lot folks still shy away from Linux. They don't want to be told to do X, and not understand why it is that they're doing it. Most people would prefer to figure out the answer themselves. For most regular users, that means playing around with the GUI and hoping that the right button clicks solve their problem.

My wife hates it when I debug her computer problems just by telling her to do X, and don't explain why. The sense of being looked down-upon is what most people hate to feel. That's why she will rarely ever come to me for computer help, until she absolutely needs it. Or worse yet, she'll just give up on it entirely. You'd be surprised how common an attitude that is with many users.

As someone who specialized in Usability for my Master's, I can honestly say that it would help tremendously if all software engineers were forced to watch usability studies involving normal computer users interacting with software. Or better yet, participating in such studies and/or tutoring such folks. You will quickly realize how attitudes like yours need to change, lest you continue to alienate people even more and send them running to easier-to-use (but less secure/powerful/etc.) alternatives.

Opposite experience

[DrYak]

The current machine I'm typing on, Celeron 1.4Ghz (P3 family) ABIT MoBo with BX chipset, Voodoo 3 Graphics card.

Linux has always "just installed" on it. (First install on it was SuSE 8.0, upgrade several times up to openSUSE 10.1 ... I should consider the status of the Novell/MS deal before going beyond 10.2 ...)

Windows is a another story. At the begining the machine was my brother's (still a teenager at that time). I managed to install him Windows XP, after several weeks fiddling with BIOS settings trying to find that peculiar configuration on which the installer of Windows XP SP1 won't b0rk. Got windows running for a couple of months. Then a massive Windows crash fucked up the installation beyond any hope. Tried to find again 'that magic BIOS configuration' that allows the installer to run (Was it compatibility problems with ACPI ? Something else ?). I just gave up. My brother preferred to try using Linux until he upgraded to a newer machine better supported by Windows. (As a side note, once I did the initial installation / configuration of Linux, he managed to do well. Granted a tennager may be more apt to adapt himself to a new OS than the average Aunt-Tillie...)

When this machine became mine, I never bottered to try to install Windows again, and it has swallowed without complain all the Linux upgrades.

The next machine my brother had was a Athlon 64, K8T mobo, with 1 Go DDR, Radeon 9600XT I bought and assembled for Christmas. Athlon 64 were a very recent newcomer on the swiss market back then (we even had problems of shortages).
Linux installation was almost a kind of "put the CD in the drive and click 'Ok'" simplicity, even if the AMD64 version of SuSE 8.2 that I had in my posession was supposed to be experimental. Mostly no other complaint as of today (just having some problems to get AIGLX and Beryl working nice).

On the other hand, Windows SP1 installer kept b0rking. I took several month, a few BIOS upgrades (not searching for an update. waiting for a new release from the manufacturer) and then a newer Catalyst (same stuff : had to wait for a few new releases) before we had a stable Windows installation that would accept the whole 1Go RAM and not showing massive graphical corruption. And that with a plain 32-bit version. (I gave a few tries with Windows XP 64 in the begining but that wasn't a success either).
In the meantime my brother had once again to use linux.
The same difficulty installing Windows XP on Athlon 64 was experienced by several friends who were early adopter to jump into the 64 bits wagon. Even as of today, Windows can't boot correctly with 3Go RAM, the third DIMM rests usually out of the computer unless I need to borrow the computer to do some scientific calculation under Linux.

This two detailled examples and numerous other situations are the reason I *CAN'T* honestly consider the experience of installing Windows XP 'stellar'.

And Linux installation, on the other hand, has regulary proved to be very felxible, with possibility to install over network and even over internet (no need to have original media), to install on headless servers (SSH is my friend), etc... which is either hard or impossible to replicate with Windows.