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Red Hat Rejects Microsoft Patent Deal Overtures
Geekgal writes "Red Hat has slammed the door shut on any possibility of entering into a patent protection deal similar to the one Microsoft recently announced with Novell, eWeek is reporting. While Microsoft has repeatedly said it wants to work with Red Hat and would like to structure a relationship where its customers can be assured of the same thing as Novell's customers now are, Mark Webbink, Red Hat's deputy general counsel, says 'we do not believe there is a need for or basis for the type of relationship defined in the Microsoft-Novell announcement.' Interestingly enough, Microsoft also says that it has not ruled out going it alone and providing some sort of indemnification for its customers who also use Red Hat Linux." Meanwhile, Eben Moglen, the FSF general counsel, promises that GPLv3 will explicitly outlaw deals like this. (Of course everyone's on v2, so calling the Novell deal "DOA" would be premature.)
Good for them! I admit I've been one of the complacent ones over the last several years, feeling like Red Hat was the Linux business big dog, and that I was a hipper hacker for spreading my use/support around to other distros. No more...
The big company I left this year was one of those whose IT bureacracy monsters that would not sanction open source, so informed and competent programmers had to use it in the dark. My new company is a Red Hat user, and I'm more proud of that today than I was yesterday. Shame on me for yesterday...
I'd like to teach the world to sing "Red Hat Is The Way"...
Let me introduce you to my very own DMCA-protected encryption key: BC 1B 64 4A 8D DE 49 E8 C3 7D CC EE 1A AD EE
I think what they mean to do is sell the indemnification directly to Red Hat users. Maybe the RIAA should think about doing that, too. That wuld just make it easier to know who to sue--anyone whose indemnification 'subscription' expired.
Though the government used to call behavior like that 'racketeering' and 'extortion'.
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I'll bet you a cookie. Do you really think Microsoft reps are going to promote another company's products let alone a Linux product? Think again.
I'll throw you a cross bet--this is just one more link in the FUD chain for Microsoft to suggest Linux has "intellectual property" problems and, more specifically, it has patent issues.
Microsoft shops that want to deploy Linux must have something very specific in mind. I'd wager they'll use whatever they think is best. It may very well be Suse, but that will probably be for reasons that have nothing to do with Novell and Microsoft forging some sort of strange and obscure patent deal.
Eh? I don't get it. So Micro$oft want us to pay them for Winblows even if we don't use it, so we don't get sued? Sounds like Micro$oft wants people who use Linux in their business to obtain a Micro$oft license to do so.
In other words, Micro$oft want us to pay a Micro$oft tax for using something that has nothing to do with them. I got two word for you Bill Gates: Piss off.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they provide indemnification."
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Wrong question - because it is not what they are doing, actually. Let me translate Microsoft's offer: there are patent problems with linux. That's what Microsoft's offer means, no more, no less. A subtle, distressing and unfair FUD machine. Your question is understandable, because they offer doesn't make sense at all, unless you examine not what it says, but the message it conveys. That message is clear: linux might be encumbered with patents belonging to MS.
It is such a pity that Novell has become a partner to this for perceived short term gains. No wonder that the free software community is up in arms (ranging from groklaw through Perens to the Samba team) - MS simply tries to single out commercial linux companies to support its own FUD propaganda. They offer these distributions a new tool to compete with: patents. So far, commercial linux distributions competed on two fronts: technical excellence and quality of support and services. Even Oracle. Novell, by accepting Microsoft's offer, introduced a new tool: patents. This is against the spirit - if not the letter - of the GPL, which tries to enforce a level playing field, and was successful until the Novell-MS deal it was successful. (That's the main gripe of the Samba team with Novell. Microsoft is fishing for others now.
Then, having given all the big enterprise Linux users a reason to switch over to those distros, Microsoft starts publishing software for those distros specifically, keeping it all closed of course
Where is the problem exactly ?
Especially since you can install these binaries in any Linux distros, just by creating a custom package. Just like some distros did for firefox binaries.
This doesn't make the OS closed at all.
Finally, after a few years, Linux has become a platform for proprietary products...and is no longer a threat to Microsoft
Why is it not a threat anymore ? It runs lots of proprietary products and all the FOSS products, and yet, you magically believe that it would no longer be a threat ?
It would be a far greater threat on the contrary : that's exactly what some company deny us now, and what people are asking for.
By ensuring that only major Linux vendors are in on it, Microsoft helps sideline other FOSS projects, killing the culture of openness and freedom and limiting choice
Which is BS. I fail to see how what you say ensure anything.
Oracle was available on RH only, it didn't sideline any FOSS database project at all, Oracle even had to buy some afterwards !!
It didn't kill culture of openness and freedom either. That's complete wishful thinking on your part, that goes contrary to factual evidence.
Notice that no overtures have been made for non-commercial distros or distros that are popular among home users: Microsoft is not threatened by them. It's about the server market, and about Microsoft's continuing inability to maintain more than a 30% market share
But MS has no valuable patent on the server side where it matters for Linux OS. So what you're saying seems like nonsense to me.
Microsoft is SOOOOO stupid in that matter.
It is evident that due to their corporate heritage/understanding, they still think that they can manipulate the whole world by dealing with a number of big corporations.
So, novell, red hat and similar will succumb to their schemes, and we, millions of developers, system admins, it managers will oblige by them ? duh ?
am i missing something here ? we 'the people' in the field were the ones to make linux come to where it is today, not the single handed effort of any company. zillions of our contribs made linux come to this point.
not only that, but we as a whole are the bulk of the community that will advise our top brass, decision-makers, bugdet planners, policy-makers in our corporations and workplaces as to what should be the best course to take.
we did not oblige by microsoft crap then, and you can easily deduct that we will never do. and you can guess that our advice/move on that matter would be to avoid more microsoft crap.
we will just scratch anybody who deals with microsoft to that kind of harmful extent, and build on something new. im not putting a prophecy here - im talking about the social dynamics and previous experience - new distros can be done, new platforms can be put together, even now-obscure operation systems/platforms may rise to prominence.
this is the power of people. microsoft has rowed against the river before, got carried away with it, STILL trying to do as such. do not make the same mistake again. and as for novell, we are already wary about you.
do not take these as the babblings of a fanatic - this is being spoken from bitter experience with these stuff and a great deal of practical concerns.
red hat has the go for now.
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This fiasco clearly shows the ideals of these two 'opensource' companies. Redhat is driven by both the idealism of open source and basis its revenue model on the value proposition and technical superiority of its products.
Novell on the other hand is a stagnated giant, it only turned to Linux in a bid to generate some revenue to comabat the decline in its directory sales. Novell is clearly driven by profit as is demonstrated by this deal with MS. With this deal Novell is no longer just competing on the strength and value proposition of its products, it has created an artificial barrier (FUD / illusion customer protection) where they are now hoping customers will consider their products of greater value as it has this 'added' protection. If Novell really believed in open source and not as just a way to make profit it would have open sourced NDS a long time ago simarily to what redhat had done with its acquisition and opensourcing of Netscape directory services.
Now I have to ask what is with the 3 year exclusive deal with MS? Surely this is not a restriction MS has imposed on itself? This must've been a directive from Novell, which makes me think that Novell is more than a puppet in this MS sponsored charade.
Yeah, Novell might decide to fork the entire GCC toolchain, the standard C libraries, the file utilities, the shell, the bootloader, and go it alone maintaining the entire system without the benefit of the Linux community. Yeah, that'll work well for them.
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If you are server tomorrow with a lawsuit from MS to stop using Linux, you have to ask you the following:
-Do I have the poclets fto fight them?
-Do I have the time to fight them?
-Do I have the energy to fight them?
note that the validity of any possible patents is completely immaterial, in a litigation systems in which money talks, the threat of being sued is enough to do whatever you are told to do if you don;t have the resources to defend yourself.
And of course MS will not go after the big players first (banks, oil companies, software producers, Hollywood studios), no, that would be an even battle.
They will go after the little guy, the one they can crush. That creates a climate of uncertainity in which Linux will be questioned instead of prised because the bully would be out to get you.
If MS had any decent intentions they would have launched an interoperability panel with the mantainers of the 5 or 6 most important Linux distributions and teams working on Samba, Mono, Cedega, OpenOffice.org and other parties interested in making interoperability work. They would have alos announce that no patents would have been used against any Linux software.
There was no need of this nonsense, but the only kind of relationship that MS understands is the one in which they are the abusive party.
I wish I could say lets give them the benefit of the doubt, but the way I see things is pretty obvious they are positioning themselves for a legal battle. They must be careful, they may be bitting more than what they can chew.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Try installing ClearCase on anything other than RedHat or SUSE. Things may have improved in the last few months, but SUSE only received official support just over a year ago. Prior to that, it was RedHat only. If you were/are a Debian user, you were essentially SOL.
Linux distros can, in fact, be marginalized by precisely the kind of half-baked support Microsoft plans.
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