Slashdot Mirror
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.)
If I wasn't running Kubuntu they would get my business.
WHY!? Why on Earth would Microsoft feel the need to offer indemnification to someone's customers in the first place? Why not just, y'know, not sue them without making some big announcement? How is it possible that we've entered a time when a software company saying "We've decided NOT to sue someone" will actually create positive PR?
Bet me.
That's easy to do.
Simply explain to them why Ford would pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Chevrolet for an agreement not to sue Mom (who drives a Chevy) for violating Ford's patents.
There, that shouldn't be so difficult, right?
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
Let me get this straight, essentially Microsoft has successfully divided the Linux community in twain by making some sort of psuedo-deal with Novell. The details of which are pretty shady and the specifics are hard to find. Both companies are using generic speak to describe the deal they've sealed. Except that it's not sealed yet as there's still some tweaking yet to be done. And now people are spreading all kinds of rumors and the SAMBA group is upset at Novell and suddenly it's like I'm back in high school again and Microsoft asked Novell to go to the senior prom--but we all know he only did that because Novell will put out in the back seat of Microsoft's dad's Cadillac. Everyone else is pissed.
The "alternative to Microsoft" community is divided and all Microsoft had to do was dump $500 million on Novell & play some mind games with them about possible suits if they didn't take this deal. Masterfully done, Microsoft. Once again, your business strategy is state of the art while your technology doesn't really have to be.
My work here is dung.
Eh? I don't get it. So Micro$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."
os trabalhos e os dias: http://zmoreira.net
How many companies and vertical markets does Microsoft have to kill off before some of you get it?
First, get them dependent on MS technologies such as Mono, then tell them time is up and they have to pay or get sued into oblivion.
"Nice little enterprise IT setup you have here. Pity if a court slapped an injunction on it."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
But I'm guessing GPLv3 just got a big boost in popularity. I wonder if the FSF is going to send Ballmer a thank-you note?
Even if in the long run, it might be your demise, you have not sold out yourself and your users to Microsoft. For that, you have our gratitude—mine and of those who'll see in the future that in spite of all odds, you made the right choice.
Thank goodness these guys didn't get into bed with M$ too. There is still hope. Won't be doing any business with Novell/Suse in the future though....
Accepting any deal of the sort from Microsoft is tantamount to giving legitimacy to a corrupt system and buying into blackmail.
Why bother.
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.
Read radical news here
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Someone please tell me what patents Microsoft has over Linux ! Don't they have the cart before the horse here, ala SCO ? "We won't sue you" Great. How are they going to sue us now ? Don't we have to infringe on something not to be sued ?
And even if Microsoft does have a patent or two buried in Linux, don't they have to give fair warning and wouldn't the OS Community just rewrite around it ?
I totally don't understand any of Microsoft's involvement with Linux. It seems to me like they are trying to scare people into getting an "indemnification license" to run Linux ! They can't control the OS itself, so they can't license that, but somehow they can extort a patent license from it ?
Doesn't make sense to me.
There aint a [got] damn thing anyone can do about it.
Get these mother f'in .nets off this mother f'in linux?
Microsoft are scared, really scared. If they can't get some leverage in the linux world, then they lose their monopoly. Can you list how many products Microsoft have released outside of a monopoly position that have made money?
Offering indemnification regarding other peoples products is crazy, unless they need to in order to hold their position as market leader. They can only be hoping to stir up more doubt.
In the mean time, though would it be possible to create a GPL 2.1? Maybe add a clause like this (taken from the CPL):
Then, the "or later" clause could be use on existing software and all new versions could hopefully be switched to the 2.1 version.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Does anyone have a list of Microsoft patents that affect GNU/Linux?
Like, what exactly are they providing indemnification for?
And how many of them likely have plenty of prior art that could be used to fight in court?
Are there any that we should specifically be worried about?
Additionally, another thing I don't get about this is that by making this Novell deal, they seem to be indicating that they are willing to sue customers of other distros for patent infringement. But since when do CUSTOMERS get sued for patent infringement? Last I checked it was only the vendors of infringing products that could get sued for patent infringement.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_200 61110_001188.html
Relevant quote from Cringely article:
I still think Microsoft is less evil than Sony though... but only just."MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
The Novell-MS "protection" is simply worthless compared to what RH has to offer. On top of that, FSF is going to release glibc/gcc/etc. under GPL v3 - which will explicitly prohibit MS-Novell deals. Which means, that in probably less than a year, Novell will be in a legal poopoo, or will remain stuck with the latest glibc that was released under GPL v2 - in other words, it will be at a technological disadvantage compared to other distroes. Actually, it is Novell whose days are numbered, not RH (especially with SUN's GPLing java, and RH owning Jboss!)
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.
Red hat is right to reject such a deal. If M$ pulls it off, it will represent the largest theft of IP ever. In the last round of theft, the non free companies closed off software that was government funded. In this theft they lay claim to anything and everything of value anyone ever writes. Now that's evil.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Just a thought here; if the rest of the Linux world moves on to GPLv3, does that prevent Novell from updating SuSE?
Has Novell effectively run itself into a corner with the MS-deal?
Privacy begins with
Microsoft doesn't want to release proprietary software for anybody's Linux distro.
What they want is to make Linux non-free. They want to scare IT managers into only using commercial distros that don't cost much less than Windows. You see, they know that their whole TCO argument is bogus. Windows is probably not cheaper TCO-wise in many situations today, and in the future, the argument will become less and less valid, not more so.
But if they can make sure that businesses (think they) have to buy Linux to use it, then they know how to compete with it.
If they have to release some proprietary stuff on Novell's distro in order to keep the FUD alive, they they may do just that. But there's nothing in their announcement that suggests that they feel the need to do that. They're gonna 'help' Novell interoperate with Windows, but that just means "if you feel you must use Linux, we'll make sure it can be made to work with Active Directory". That just kills 2 birds with one stone. Preventing any migration to NDS, which is cross-platform, and removing the Linux price advantage. I think they even get some royalty payment.
All of which is targeted at one ultimate goal... elimination of the Linux threat.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
What you fail to explain is why Microsoft specifically refers to Novell. If the software is free, as you say, then why not simply say that Microsoft won't sue anyone? You may answer that perhaps Microsoft simply happened to deal with Novell, and when they said "We won't sue Novell's customers", they really meant that they wouldn't be suing any customers. But that's patently false, since Steve Ballmer specifically said that the protection afforded Novell('s clients) is something that other distros wouldn't have. They even went out of their way to offer the same deal to Red Hat, so clearly Red Hat didn't have the same indemnity that you were suggesting would have applied to any user of the software.
You may say that that's a minor detail, with the important thing being that Microsoft is actually working with a Linux vendor! But keep in mind: Microsoft is not a technology company. Microsoft is a marketing company. As such, the perception of the marketplace is their lifeline and focus. You must admit that the outcome of the Microsoft-Novell pact is the perception of legitimacy in the vague threats about patents and intellectual property, similar to the SCO case.
Whether this is the deliberate intent of a conniving scheme, or simply a byproduct of Microsoft's genuine desire to support and promote Linux, is a matter of opinion. Given the past history of Microsoft with respect to software freedom, working with corporate partners, and throwing money around, I would side with the Slashdotters who are taking Microsoft's altruistic pronouncements with more than a grain of salt.
In the meantime, yes, some other nice things have resulted: Microsoft acknowledging the importance of Linux, the $380M to Novell, etc. Doesn't mean we stand by while the FUD is being spread about Software Freedom.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]