Slashdot Mirror
Perens Rains on Novell's Parade
unum15 writes "This week is Novell's Brainshare conference. They are touting the Microsoft covenant not to sue as 'good for consumers'. However, Bruce Perens decided to take this opportunity to 'rain on Novell's parade'. Perens read a statement from RMS affirming the GPLv3 would not allow companies to enter deals like this and continue to offer GPLv3 software. Perens even goes as far as to suggest this move is an exit strategy by Novell. There are also audio and pictures of the event available."
Is it just me, or did Hovsepian intentionally misunderstand that statement? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I read your statement to mean that Novell would effectively become a subsidiary to Microsoft without actually being bought out. Much in the same way that Microsoft "Partners" tend to exist only so long as it amuses Microsoft. When Microsoft grows tired of them, they do something that completely undermines the trust and business model of those partners. (See: PlaysForSure, OS/2, Sybase, Spyglass, Citrix, etc.)
It amazes me that companies still fall for that trick, but there you go. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Bye Novell, it was nice knowing you.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
People hold high expectations on Novell, and I really don't know why. Of course they "bought" Suse in 2003, the Mono project, and some other free software projects. but Novell was, is and will always be a proprietary software company. They don't care about Free Software, they are not into it for the ideals. Back them they saw an opportunity to make money off free software, so they invested, made some money but, in the end, they would dump everything in a heartbeat and partner with Microsoft if it is more profitable for them.
And that's the beauty of Free Software. They can dump Linux and Free Software all they want, if they do, as fast as it takes, a fork for all projects that they are personally involved (Suse, Gnome, Mono, from the top of my head) will pop up and continue almost as nothing has happened.
And I really wish that happens. I don't like the way they are handling Gnome, ignoring completely the community in order to satisfy Novell's aims and goals (mostly, appease to Windows "converted" users. The recent created Gnome Control Panel is a copy of Windows Control Panel, except that it is slow and cluttered like Win 3.11 Program Manager). That, and things like bundling Mono, pfff. But that's another subject, that doesn't belong here.
Just a heads up. Novell has done nothing to deserve your trust. Don't look surprised when they finally misbehave.
They did not understand Free / Open Source software.
They paid $210 million for SuSE. Why?
The more intelligent approach would be to hire developers who would submit patches that you wanted to the various projects that you're interested in.
Then you Open the protocols that you control that you want to see more widely adopted. And pay developers to incorporate those protocols.
Novell had the idea that it can acquire Linux by buying Linux distributions and projects. When this didn't pay out, Novell decided to "partner" with Microsoft in search of some more money.
GPL doesn't restrict anything. Copyright laws do. GPL, as the L in the initials says, is a license that exempt you from the no-distribution no-derivative-work limitations that is the core of the copyright concept, as long as you agree with the GPL conditions. How can people distort that simple reality and say GPL restricts freedom is a mystery to me.
It is simple as that. Without GPL, fair use aside, you cannot (legally) use, you cannot derive, you cannot distribute. With GPL, as long as you grant the same rights when you distribute, you can. Now tell me again, how GPL restricts any freedom? How can a license to restrict a freedom that you didn't have in the first place?
Because all the GNU tools that Linux depends upon (most significantly the entire toolchain they rely on to build the software) _will_ be GPL3 when GPL3 comes out. This means they either have to spend money to maintain the old GPL2 tools themselves or find alternates. No alternative currently exists for gcc which is free software.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
That will put them at a significant competitive disadvantage to the likes of RedHat. They will be saddled with maintaining old versions of very complex software (like the entire gcc toolchain, plus binutils and the like) - whereas companies who are not pariahs will just continue using the latest GPLv3 versions of this software. Novell's costs will therefore be significantly higher since they can no longer benefit from the work of the actual package maintainers themselves.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Then you are distributing the binary inside the router. That is distribution. You can modify it without releasing the sources as long as you only use it in-house. Microsoft could run Linksys Routers with a heavily modified Linux firmware and would not be required to release the source as long as they don't sell/distribute it.
Move Sig. For great justice.
A lot of people would disagree with that. Hell, the GPL disagrees with that:
See? "restrictions". Just because they are lesser restrictions than the default case of "no rights at all", that doesn't mean they ain't restrictive.
I'm a big fan of the GPL myself, but let's try not to sacrifice accuracy to zealotry here.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Finally this thread is getting somewhere.
Copyright law is the mechanism by which GPL works, but SOFTWARE PATENTS are the real issue here, as Bruce explains very well in his talk.
The "protection racket" is about the patents that MS implies Linux infringes on. And as Bruce points out, pretty much any non-trivial software probably infringes on someone else's software patents.
That's because software patents in the USA have been doled out too easily. They are absurd.
What's worse, Bruce explains, there is actually a _penalty_ for trying to figure out if your own software infringes. Because if you can be shown to have infringed on a patent you actually know about, the damages are tripled.
Small companies and individual software developers are at the biggest risk. Because big companies have portfolios of patents that they routinely cross-license, thereby protecting themselves from each other. The small guys are locked out. And of course, little guys don't have the money to maintain a legal defense even when they are totally in the right, forcing them to settle.
Software patents in the US are the problem.
People hold high expectations on Novell, and I really don't know why. Of course they "bought" Suse in 2003, the Mono project, and some other free software projects. but Novell was, is and will always be a proprietary software company.
It's all about Mono.
While C# certainly doesn't have nearly the installed code base that Java has, ".NET" is pulling even with [and might even have surpassed] "J2EE":
As much as everybody loves to hate the guy, Ballmer was 100% correct when he said that it's all about "developers, developers, developers", and if you think ".NET" isn't the hottest thing in the programming market right now, then, well, you've been asleep at the wheel for the last five years.
Mono is the ace up Novell's sleeve; with the Microsoft agreement, they are assured that they've got something that Red Hat doesn't have, that Oracle won't have [with the upcoming "Oracle" Linux], and that even IBM or Sun wouldn't have, if they were to roll their own Linuxes, which is to say: An ironclad guarantee that their flavor of Linux will play nice with
Going to do a reverse and say they did give all licensing to SCO?
Microsoft lackey Novell Exec "My bad, Here is the papers that say we did give them all UNIX licenses"
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
See? "restrictions". Just because they are lesser restrictions than the default case of "no rights at all", that doesn't mean they ain't restrictive.
That's semantics. GPL doesn't restrict anything that you would be able to do with standard copyright law. Copyright law says you can't do A, B, C, D and E. GPL says you can now do A, B, C. How is that restricting?
Notice, I'm not denying GPL has more conditions than BSD or Public Domain. All I'm saying is that has one goal, to make sure any software and all its derivatives under that license will be able to be freely run, studied, derived and distributed. They never hid that goal, it is the GNU manifesto, for god sake. If they could simply say that, in a clear and unambiguously way, such confusions would never exist in the first place. But because of the likes of Tivo, Novell and others, that will try to find a loophole and release derivative works without granting those rights, FSF has to created this tangled network of legalese, to close as many holes as they can.
"Restrictive" is not the opposite of "free" though, which is what the GGP was implying.
I am not free to own slaves. Am I restricted, or is everyone else more free? The answer is everyone is more free because nobody can own slaves.
Similarly, the GPL only restricts your ability to restrict others. This means the fewest restrictions for all. Isn't that the most freedom possible? Free to do anything but take freedom from others.
The GPL's restrictions are only anti-free to those who think only of themselves. The GPL is not for them.
The enemies of Democracy are
Why is the parent modded flamebait? This seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constructors of the US Constitution drafted the first amendment, I'm sure that yelling "fire!" maliciously in a crowded public building wasn't what they had in mind. Instead, it's a specific type of freedom which has a few limitations. However, these limitations are important to preserve the function and spirit of said rights. The same goes for the GPL.
By releasing code under the GPL, I'm saying effectively, "you can have my code for free, and even change whatever you want, provided you don't restrict anyone else from doing the same." The BSD license allows the author to say, "use whatever you like, and you can close up my source code and not share with anybody if you want to." If that license is more attractive to you, than by all means, release your code under the BSD license instead of GPL. But like me, many people want the guarantee of the continuing freedom of the code they release. For those of us who feel that way, the GPL is exactly the right license.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Personally as I see it the developer chooses a licence to avoid the hassle of working out what rights they hand out - but it is THEIR work and does not belong to whatever faction has started playing games in the FSF recently.
The copyrights to the gcc toolchain belong to the FSF -- they ARE the owners of the work! It has long been a condition to work on the official fork: if you want your patches to go everywhere, you assign copyright. Developers that don't like that are free to make their own forks (as with Emacs vs. XEmacs), but FSF has had enough developers who are OK with it to now have the definitive version of gcc.
And if you think GPLv3 is a recent "game" from a "faction" in the FSF, you haven't been paying attention for about 20 years. FSF has ALWAYS been about copyleft. They predate the OSS movement by a decade and Usenet is littered with the ashes of long flamewars about the GPL license.