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

They have every right.

[MarkByers]

'no right to make self servicing deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community'

Actually they have every right to do whatever they like as long as it is within the law. There is nothing specific in the GPL that says they cannot make a deal with Microsoft. The only thing that will stop companies from doing things like this, is if they lose customer support. If you don't like it, don't buy their products.

Re:They have every right.

[Freed]

Uh, the idiomatic "right to ..." phrase typically means "moral justification to ...".

Re:They have every right.

[Bruce Perens]

The particular patent deal that they made is against section 7 of the GPL and also other parts of the license.

Novell is attempting to create a loophole in the license with a legal fiction. By paying Microsoft to make a covenant to Novell's users directly, instead of to Novell, they are attempting to get us, and whatever judges eventually rule on this, to believe that no patents are being licensed even though the effect is the same as if they were being licensed.

There is also the matter of the spirit of the license. By violating that, they are making a clear "screw you" gesture to everyone whose code they are running. There are now a lot of angry people who will now go out of their way to get business to go elsewhere than Novell. Have you noticed that SCO's business went completely down the tubes? Novell's going to have a hard time avoding that.

Bruce

Re:whee

[WindBourne]

Considering that MS, Novell, and SCO have been interwined for 20 + years, Yes. Keep in mind that Novell owned SCO at one time and sold it off to Caldera. Of course, Caldera was a start-up from who? Novell's own Ray Noorda. Now, I liked Ray, but the whole Novell, SCO, Caldera is an inbred world. The best thing that Novell could have done was kept the SUSE team together for diversity. But they dismantled the group. What is left now, is a group that is trying to figure out how to take over the number one spot from Redhat without regard to the long term impact of the linux world. These guys think very short term. Once they increase the value of the company, they will break it apart and sell it off. Remember what happened to SCO? Same thing.

Re:Opposite

[BlueStrat]

I can't have some hacked together stuff that that may or may not interact well.

If this is the case, then you're definitely using the wrong solution. MS only interacts well with MS (if even then..interoperability in MS solutions isn't universal or without its' own problems), with only a few exceptions. Even those exceptions are usually a result of the work of people outside of MS, reverse engineering things with, at the very least, no help from MS...that is, if MS doesn't actively work through multiple means to impede or halt any such efforts outright.

One of F/OSSs' main strengths is the ability to interoperate without artificial barriers for the sole purpose of increasing corporate profits, lock-in, and marketshare.

There are F/OSS alternatives available already to accomplish everything you've cited. I know, I've done it. A few minutes' googling will usually result in multiple F/OSS apps/systems/OSs, etc to accomplish a given task. That you chose the MS solution is just that; *your* choice.

However, saying that you have no choice in order to stay in business and/or avoid firing employees is disengenuous. There *are* choices, you just *chose* not to avail yourself of them. Citing "peace of mind" and "interoperability" as reasons is facetious, as it has been widely acknowledged that both qualities are present in spades with current non-MS approved/certified F/OSS solutions.

If you're so concerned about the welfare of your employees, perhaps the money you could save using F/OSS solutions could be used to hire more employees or increase benefits/pay rates of current workers.

Just my 0.02

Strat