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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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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It doesn't matter. They already reversed themselves on their most important pledge and that is to leverage their patents against anybody who sues an open source project for patent violation.
They will no longer come to the defense of open source projects if MS sues them and that's what MS was after all along. MS has already gotten the same kind of deal from Sun. If they can get IBM they will be done.
evil is as evil does