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Why the Novell / MS Deal Is Very Bad
jamienk writes "PJ from Groklaw has taken the time to really explain the big picture of the Novell/MS deal and how it all fits into the SCO case and the strategy some have employed to attack Free Software. If you thought PJ was becoming too shrill before, or if you haven't understood what the big deal is with Novell's agreement, it's really worth a read." From the article: "This is Groklaw's 2,838th article. We now have 10,545 members, who have worked very hard to disprove SCO's scurrilous claims, and we did. We succeeded, beyond my hopes when we started. But here's the sad part. As victory is in sight, Novell signs a patent agreement with Microsoft..."
Better explanation here: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2068769,00.as p
Novell also retained the unusual right to require SCO to follow its directions to amend, supplement, modify or waive these licenses and, if SCO does not comply, Novell can do so on SCO's behalf.
Ubuntu isn't made soley by volunteers, although volunteers play a big role in it. A lot of companies pay people to work on linux, and they do it because it fits into their business plan.
MS is probably never going to come after you for license money. But they might go after big companies that support linux -- IBM, RedHat, etc. And they might scare large enterprise customers away from linux.
If these things happen, your free ubuntu starts to wither and die. All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drivers you need, the fancy new desktop software, etc.
Linux is an ecosystem, and all of the parts need to be healthy in order for it to continue. While this situation doesn't threaten you personally, it does effect other vital members of our ecosystem, and if they go down, we're all going to be a lot worse off over the long run,
I don't know about anybody else but this hasn't induced any fear, uncertainty or doubt in me about Linux.
However, it has induced REAL fear, REAL uncertainty and REAL doubt in Novell SUSE. Up until this incident started, I had pretty much decided that SUSE would be the distribution we would base all our new web/db/mail servers on owing to its combination of corporate support and ease of use.
Now I'm back on the fence considering Red Hat or another distro.
Unfortunately, I think SUSE inadvertently screwed themselves. In this regard, I have to say that Red Hat is doing an awesome job. They have deliberately tried to meet the Linux "community standards" while still being commercial. If only they were more open with their non-Fedora distributions, we would have probably standardized on Red Hat from the start.
Sunny
Be my Friend
The short answer, no.
The SCO Group has dug themselves into a rather large litigation hole that surpasses what it would cost to purchase the entire company. They owe something like $20 million to Novell in royalties, Red Hat has a lawsuit which TSCOG will likely lose now that its become obvious to the court that they had been lying all along, and there is the potential of investor lawsuits due to the run up in the stock price to over $20 dollars a share and the eventual collapse as everyone realized they were lying about their evidence.
So you see it would be foolish for IBM to purchase TSCOG at this point because of the huge financial risk now hanging over them.
... why bother... their stock is toast, so couldn't IBM just buy a controlling interest for $11.2M and wind it down?
Doing so would invite thousands of nuisance suits from people who want to be bought off by being bought out. Suing IBM would become both a neat way to make a few million bucks and an exit strategy for every failing company that could make a vuagely-plausible argument that IBM had something to do with their fall.
So instead IBM has chosen to counter-attack, sucking all the blood out of SCO and leaving a dessicated corpse hanging on a spike for all to see.
It's an object lesson on the pitfalls of trying extortion on Big Blue.
They have had this policy for a while. SCO is just the biggest band of fools-or-crooks to come along in a long time, trying something new with ramifications in one of the biggest-bucks fights in a long time: the war between Microsoft and Open Source. So SCO gets the biggest spotlight.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Richard Stallman has proven time and again -for over 20 years now -- that he has long term vision and real brains.
He played this game for much longer than most of us.
Is he a wee bit extreme ? Yes.
But without that single-minded focus he couldn't have pulled it off for the first 10+ years when he was practically alone.
I would trust him with my life, nevermind GPLv3.
The problem is that Novell's agreement can be seen as legitimizing Microsoft's claims, which can create fear among companies thinking about adopting GNU/Linux.
Fabio Aquotte
It's funny- looking back, people always said Stallman was crazy and the stuff he talked about wouldn't happen- and time and again, it did. History continually repeats - only the proprietary people are getting more and more extreme in their demands. Stallman's been asking for the same thing for the past 20 years, the proprietary makers have been demanding more and more. I refuse to accept their bullshit- I'll use Free Software as much as possible- the only proprietary stuff I have on my computer is stuff that is absolutely necessary to run my hardware- and my next one will have no such need.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Linux supports more devices "out of the box" than any other operating system ever has. Yes, even FreeBSD.
r face.c
The other key highlight of this talk was:
Closed source Linux kernel modules are illegal.
Closed source Linux kernel modules are unworkable.
Closed source Linux kernel modules are unethical.
So who the hell is this guy? He's Greg Kroah-Hartman. Who the hell is that? He's a kernel developer. His name appears 149 times in my kernel sources (Ubuntu patched, 2.6.15). And, perhaps more tellingly it appears at the top of the files:
drivers/pci/pci-sysfs.c and
drivers/pci/search.c
both of which contain many functions which are called from functions in this file:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8776-pkg1/usr/src/nv/os-inte
What's that? It's wrapper for the closed source NVIDIA kernel module. What license is that under? The NVIDIA Software License. It's basically a proprietary EULA with a redistribution (without modification) exception for distros. It sure aint the GPL, or "as free" as the GPL (which is techically what the GPL requires for derived works).
So Greg.. why don't you sue them? You've made your position clear, fight them. If you havn't got the money, contact the FSF, assign your copyright to them, get them to fight. Given the choice between opening their source code or not being able to distribute their software at all, NVIDIA will choose to open their source code. How can I be so sure? Cause people buy their chipsets to integrate into things like set top boxes and other devices that run Linux. They need that embedded market, that's why they released the drivers in the first place. The problem is that no-one is making them choose.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Novell didn't really sell Unix to SCO. SCO became a Unix licensing agent for Novell, but technically SCO does own the title to the Unix contracts. SCO collects money on these contracts, remits 100% to Novell, and then Novell pays SCO a pittance for its duties (5%). In order to protect its interests, Novell retained the right, "at its sole discretion and direction, to require SCO to amend, supplement, modify or waive any rights under, or assign any rights to, any SVRX licensee". If SCO failed to abide by this direction, Novell retained the right "to take any such action on behalf of SCO". Novell exercized this right in June 2003, August 2003 and Feb 2004, and is now asking the court for Summary Judgment to force SCO to recognize these 2+ year old waivers. Read the motion, it goes into great detail. Hope that helps enough that you don't have to though, that's the general gist of it.
SCO are trying to assert legal ownership of key IP in the Linux system, and in Linux as a whole. They're sued IBM as a way of establishing this right, and for their pains they are currently being slowly flayed by IBM in the courts.
Novell bought SUSE, one of the big commercial distros. If SCO succeed in their suit, Novell has to buy a licence from SCO or stop distributing Linux. Additionally, Novell reckon that if there is any proprietary IP in Linux, they've got a better claim to it than SCO, and they can prove it. So in the case of SCO, Novell are on our side.
At the same time, Novell have entered into a deal with Microsoft. Most of it seems to be smoke and mirrors, but what it appears to boil down to is that in return for Novell paying a royalty to MS, MS will help their competitive position with respect to the other distros by threatening to sue rival distributors, developers... almost anybody really. Even SUSE users aren't safe, since MS can cancel the agreement with anyone, any time and for any reason. So it's pretty much a promise not to sue unless they really feel like it. Reassuring, huh? Novell also agreed not to use their patent arsenal to defend Linux against MS, and in return, they get a big pot of cash.
In this case, it's rather harder to approve of Novell's actions. The deal may not have any legal implications for linux users anywhere, but the patent agreement is going back on a promise they made earlier to the Linux community. On top of that, it's just not a friendly act towards the rest of the community. Other objections have been raised, such attempting to circumvent the PLL, but I can't see how that works, and neither can Mogen Eblen, so I think the whole thing's a combination marketing-and-barratry-deal.
There are some reservations still as to what else may have been agreed upon. A lot of people are concerned that Novell may try and inject code that clearly violate MS patents into one or more open source packages. Mono and the new OpenOffice fork are particularly worrying in that regard.
So to sum up:
Bad Guys:Microsoft, SCO.
Self-Serving Opportunists:Novell
Good Guys:Linux devs, distributors other than Novell and SCO, users
Caught In The Crossfire:SUSE devs
Hope that helps. Have a nice day.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!