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Novell Responds To Microsoft's IP Claims
Azul writes "Ron Hovsepian, Novell's CEO, has posted an open letter to the Community, where he explicitly states Novell's disagreement with Steve Ballmer's claims of Linux infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property. From the letter: 'We disagree with the recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents. Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents.'"
samrolken
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200611202 03431766
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In that case, with all due respect, you should not have signed an agreement called a patent cooperation agreement that gives Microsoft the opportunity to say the things Mr. Ballmer has been saying. I believe that is obvious now. And you should have considered the GPL, its importance to the community, and considered what paying royalties means in that context. And we hope you will fix this.
And MS
Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents....
We at Microsoft respect Novell's point of view on the patent issue, even while we respectfully take a different view. Novell is absolutely right in stating that it did not admit or acknowledge any patent problems as part of entering into the patent collaboration agreement. At Microsoft we undertook our own analysis of our patent portfolio and concluded that it was necessary and important to create a patent covenant for customers of these products. We are gratified that such a solution is now in place.
- sigs are for wimps.
My gut reaction to this deal is very negative.
I really like a lot of what Novell has done on the desktop, and some of the mono desktop apps are pretty terrific. But I sort of feel like I ought to be moving toward KDE now, and distancing myself from anything mono.
The question I have, though, is about the patents. Either MS has patents that can be used to attack linux or they're pulling another SCO on us.
So much of the argument against Novell hinges on the fact that they're enabling MS with this deal. As I understand the argument, it says that corporate customers will buy Novell, to be safe from potential lawsuits. If MS can pick off a critical mass of commercial users who are willing to pay, they can start to sue other people without damaging relationships with their large corporate customers. Even non-novell customers will have a way out -- they can buy Novell.
If MS has these patents, do we really believe that fear of alienating their customers is enough for them to refrain from suing people? Couldn't they sue IT companies -- linux companies, IBM, etc., without damaging their relationships with large corporate customers? And aren't those large customers so locked in that they really don't have anywhere to go if they're alienated, anyway?
To me, this really isn't about Novell. I don't pay them, and I don't code for any projects, so I understand that they don't really care about me. It would be irrational for them if they did. But this sort of burns the bridge to Novell and mono as far as I'm concerned. That's done.
But how big is this threat? Is this the beginning of legal threat spanning years and years. with fronts opening up in legislatures, in anti-trust enforcement agencies around the world, etc.?
Is this real, or is this a bunch of baseless stuff that's going to dog us for years?
If a free OS that's built from scratch by volunteers can't be allowed to exist in the current intellectual property law environment, what then? Does this mean we either have to give up and finally take on the intellectual property framework at some really fundamental level?
Read the interview Moglen: How we'll kill the Microsoft Novell deal.
Alright that's the legal piece. There's also www,boycottnovell.com and the Samba disapproval. Other links and ideas welcome.
I was kept wondering how on earth did steve balless say that linux is infringing microsoft's patent? Did he really know what the heck he is saying? Linux is the kernel not the whole system. I dont think novell even owns THE KERNEL! I am very very pissed. and yet I am still using windows :(
The only thing I see every day is my laptop dying on me. http://www.op3r.com
Casey Jones is ready, watch your speed.
Is this a commonly misheard lyric or something? It's "Casey Jones you better watch your speed.".
The lyric as you wrote it doesn't even make sense.
if we had documentation on how NTFS lays out the filesystem we'd have a safe r/w driver in under a month.
Such as say, http://www.ntfs-3g.org/?
Sort of.
It's been known for a while that to help out with the lawsuit SCO recieved a massive cash injection to the tune of $40 million or so from Baystar Capital. Baystar is a VC company that controls a lot of Microsof money.
Since the time of the investment until a few weeks ago, the offical line was that Baystar acted on its own, and the fact that it was Microsoft capital being used to bankroll SCO's legal team was a mere coincidence.
But then maybe a month ago, the court heard testimony that not only did Microsoft know about Baystar's investment into SCO, but that the investment was at least encouraged (at worst, ordered) by Microsoft.
You can find all the relevant court documents, commentary, and links on Groklaw.
Not quite a smoking gun, but very compelling evidence that Redmond was putting its money where its mouth was, at least in a roundabout and obfuscatory way. There are no serious suggestions that what Microsoft did is actionable, yet it is pretty clear that they were up to their same old dirty tricks
There's nothing funny about it - it makes perfect sense even if you believe that Microsoft doesn't innovate. One of the reasons people say that Microsoft doesn't innovate is that MS has a history of buying or in some cases acquiring in more underhanded ways, innovations from other companies. In such cases, there may be innovations that one would want to interoperate with, but they don't originate with MS. Secondly, the desire to interoperate with MS software has nothing to do with whether MS software is innovative. So long as significant numbers of people use MS software, other people will have an interest in interoperating. For example, I may have to deal with documents that people send me in MS Word format, but that doesn't mean that I think that there is anything innovative or otherwise attractive about that format. I'm stuck with other people's choices.
Two-things: You're correct, there are few "original" ideas. And I would say any idea that isn't original (or is blatantly obvious) shouldn't be patentable. Technically you're not supposed to be able to patent an obvious or non-original idea, but regular slashdot readers will remember a litany of patent cases where the idea was obvious, unoriginal, or described something so broad and vague as to preclude all possible competition. If that rule was enforced, I wouldn't have a problem with software patents. But you actually make the point of the GP-poster who I think was pointing out (correctly) that there are WAY TOO MANY patents for software being issued, to the point that it is stifling creativity rather than encouraging it.
Secondly... You're comparing apples and giraffes... A patent for a TV-set is a patent for a device and the device alone... and not even for the whole device, but for parts of the device... They don't have a patent on the idea of viewing video over a cathode-ray-tube, they have a patent on an implementation of technology to ACHIEVE the viewing of video over a device in your home. If you can create a TV-set that works without the patented technologies you would be free to sell it without any license from anybody. This is as it should be--if your TV-set works better than the patented model then the patent has achieved its goal--it allowed the orginal inventor to get something for his work, while enticing you to evolve the tech to the next level. The key is, you have to PRODUCE something that WORKS in order to get a patent.
Software patents, as they've been used to date, are doing just the opposite. Software patents are being granted for basic, "helloworld.c" implementations of broad and complex concepts... "Software" developed not to create a marketable or usable product, but for the pupose of acquiring a patent that can later be used to hijack a successful competitors profits. "Oops, we realized a patent we filed a few years back might apply to your product. Please pay us several billion dollars." The patent-related-extortion of RIM comes to mind... Rather than create real products and patenting the original/unique components of THOSE products, they're instead setting up dozens or hundreds of projects whose goal is to achieve a patent, and not to actually bring any workable product to market. Instead of giving consumers access to MORE technology, as more of these bogus astroturf patents get filed, the effect is actually opposite: Innovators who can't afford to pay high licensing fees (or patent-search fees to an attorney) simply can't relase their products in any way that they can easily profit from, for fear of being sued into destitution by an "inventor" (whose "invention" was written as a fifty-line C program by a CS-grad student) who suddenly comes out of the woodwork waving a patent your search didn't find, and wanting half of your profits.
In fact, the RIM case should really underline the absurdity of the patent-situation in the software world, because the patents RIM was sued over were eventually invalidated, but RIM still was out several hundred-million from a settlement they made, and from attorneys fees. Even INVALID patents can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the right lawyer and low-enough ethical standards for yourself. THAT stifles competition, and THAT is just plain broken.
Who did what now?
This is why the term "intellectual property" is, at best, vague and meaningless. What you said only applies to trademarks. It does not apply to trade secrets, copyrights, or patents.
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And again all the posts that are +5 are those that say the same thing over and over again.
c e/2006-11/msg00004.html- suse-linux-wtf.html- opens-microsoft0 6-11-08/transcript#The_Novell.2F_Microsoft_deal
The deal is done. Live with it. At least Novell tries to answer the questions people have. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. People asked that they wanted the details of the deal, so they gave them. They gave a lot of promises.
The IRC meeting will most likely also just be a lot of copy-cats yelling: Yes, but you signed a deal with M$ and we are so anti-M$ that we don't care about anything else.
So instead of yelling that it is so bad, come up with a realistic alternative what you want and what questions you want answerd. Be at the IRC meeting and/or see that your answers are asked on the site if you can't be there.
It is very much fun to react emotionaly, yet it is only spreading the FUD further, no matter who started that FUD.
The useal links:
http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-announ
http://dev-loki.blogspot.com/2006/11/call-to-dump
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4287912423.html
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2168151/novells
http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/Status_Meeting_20
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Coding around a patent is almost always, pretty easy."
No, it isn't. It's easy to code around copyright-infringment. But how do you write around a patent? Suppose MS has a patent that covers writing files to a disk. How do you code around that? That's the difference between copyright and patent. Copyright covers the actual code, and it's easy to fix: just re-write the offending part. But patents are a whole different ball of wax. To use the file-writing example: MS could say that code in Linux that is responsible for writing files to a disk, infringes on their copyright. MS would then show the infringing code, and then they would show their code. At this point, hackers would re-write the offending part, and that problem is solved. But if MS said "We have patented writing files to a disk, and Linux infringes on that patent", what do you do? Remove the relevant functionality from Linux? That's one option. The other is to pay Microsoft for a license to use their patent. that is, if they were willing to take your money. they could just demand that you remove the feature.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Problem is that Linux server market is growing on shrinking of Unix server base.
That's no longer true, I've seen a lot of "new" Linux based deployments that weren't simply based on UNIX displacements. Conversely, the new Windows deployments I've seen are those where 3rd party support for Linux is still lacking. In the market I deal in, telecom/isp, Linux currently has a numerical lead over Windows in new deployments. For the distro watchers, it's still RHEL by a wide margin, with the occasional SLES but SLES still has some ground to make up on 3rd party certifications.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Well thank god Apple choose to use Linux to extend the NeXTStep base OS X uses then. OS X would have been a failure without Linux's massive marketing force behind it.
Little hint, when basing the next version of your Flagship product on another OSS project, it doesn't really matter if the base is really well known or not. In this case, Microsoft's name would be selling the product, not FreeBSD or Linux no matter which route they went with.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."