Samba Team Urges Novell To Reconsider

hde226868 writes "The team responsible for Samba has just asked Novell to reconsider its recent patent agreement with Microsoft, arguing that the agreement is a divisive agreement, effectively splitting the open source movement into groups with and without commercial status. Samba argues that with this move Novell is disregarding the will of the people who write the software sold by Novell and that Novell has 'no right to make self servicing deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community'."

Comments

Re:A little confusion

[lawaetf1]

You are completely missing the point. It's not that the agreement between Novell and MSFT has resulted in any immediate damages to end users, it is that the agreement raises the specter of litigation to all non-Novell Linux distributors and their clients. FUD. Microsoft is trying to drive a great big wedge in the open source community by appointing Novell, the distributor with the least market share, as the "approved" Linux distributor. Balmer himself said that everyone else is open to legal action as they're not covered by this bogus cross patent licensing. Just because you Joe-six-pack might not wind up in court doesn't mean that enormous damage hasn't been done to the community as a whole.

Boycott Novell. If you have servers on SuSe, move them to another distro.

Re:Stop your bitching

[Bruce Perens]

The purpose of section 7 of the GPL (and the rest of the GPL, which reinforces section 7) is that we must all hang together or we will surely hang separately. It's written to prohibit any one party from making a patent deal that the rest of the community will not benefit from. Novell's deal surely, clearly, inarguably violates the spirit of that - and that's a very clear message to the people who gave Novell that license. I contend that it also violates the letter.

Thanks

Bruce

Tomorrow...

[Bruce Perens]

The code is already out there, the developers can't take it back.

Actually, some of the developers may indeed take it back through the courts. That is yet to be decided. But even if they don't take it back, a lot of those developers will go to GPL3 just because of this. Including important stuff like the C library and GCC (which FSF owns). And it's already been made clear that GPL3 will close this loophole.

Bruce

Re:whee

[kimvette]

(chronology and events altered slightly for creative license)

Microsoft introduced Xenix, spun it off and begat Santa Cruz Organization -- The Old SCO(tm) and it was good; an affordable x86 Unix environment.

Novell was a very proprietary company which improved their products v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y ('80s through mid '90s) so SCO a group of engineers and execs left Novell and begat Caldera. Caldera bought DR-DOS after the Windows incompatibility fiasco (deliberate sabotage by Microsoft), declared that "OSes want to be free" and opened up their DOS source for all to see. Caldera begat Free DOS, and it was good.

Novell saw their market declining due to interoperability problems introduced by Microsoft, and by utilities introduced by Microsoft which were promoted for use for bypassing Novell's per-seat restrictions. Novell examined their positions, saw that Unix had a strong future, so they bought the IP for Unix, assigned SCO as the license broker for Unix IP, and saw that it was good.

Caldera looked upon the Free DOS and their gaining a decent following, and declared that open source looked promising, so they introduced a Linux distribution that was a bit ahead of its time. They looked upon their package management and update download-equipped open-source Linux operating system and saw that it was good.

Santa Cruz Organization saw its Unix product's future shrinking, and even with their 5% comission on Unix licensing they could read the writing on the wall for their core product, so they sold the "SCO" name and Unix products and contracts to Caldera, and thought all was well. The New SCO renamed Caldera Linux to SCO OpenLinux and claimed that it was good, and all was well.

Enter the serpent who goes by the name Darl McBride; a sneaky if not clever demon who felt that he could tempt investors to take a bite from his fruit of profit. He declared that Linux Stole SCO Code and thart SCO in fact owns the IP to all Unix-like OSes. In doing this the serpent indeed deceived them and got them to take a nibble with his declaration that Linux infringed upon his Unix IP and that all Linux users must pay him $699/processor/Linux box. Linux users grumbled to the Lord.

The serpent bit AutoZone's and Daimler Chrysler's heels, took them to court, and the judge did stomp on the serpent's head, crushing it, and rendered its vemon harmless. Linux users rejoiced, singing "O where is SCO's sting?"

Serpent McBride of SCO, relentless in his evil, pursued Lord Novell and Lord IBM into court. The courts did chuckle, but granted the serpent access to the throne. McBride shouted "I will own Linux! I will own Unix! Users will bow down to me and I will be like the most high Novell!"

Linux users, seeing through the deception, grumbled to the Lord, and proclaimed "Woe unto SCO, for they are evil and their king Darl McBride shall surely perish." The Lord IBM and The Lord Novell heard their grumbling and took offense at SCOs actions. They dragged SCO back into court, presented their counterclaims, saw SCO's stock plummet, and it was good.

Re:full disclosure

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

Yeah well I work for Novell. So what do you have to say about that ?

I can say this statement was agreed upon unanimously by the Team.

Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.

Re:They have every right.

[AirLace]

Nobody with any sense in the free software world has touched Mono

Right, that is why Debian GNU/Linux was the first to not only package Mono, include it in the distribution but also write a spec describing how packages using Mono can integrate right into the core of the system.

I won't go into how the gtk-sharp toolkit is one of the best maintained and most active language bindings for the gtk+ GUI toolkit incuded in GNOME today.

Free Software developers who haven't touched Microsoft Windows in years or who come from a completely UNIX background are happily writing desktop applications, system daemons and web applications using Mono today.

So, Bruce Perens, what on earth are you talking about?