Novell Partners With EFF on Patent Busting

Seymour writes "Novell and the EFF have announced that Novell will be contributing to the EFF's Patent Busting Project. Novell will also support the EFF's efforts toward patent reform, including with the WIPO. Could this be Novell trying to get back in the good graces of Linux users? 'Novell's agreement with Microsoft has been a source of contention within open source circles, with one Red Hat executive accusing the company of appeasing Microsoft; others have accused Novell of violating the GPL with the agreement. Either way, signing the deal with Microsoft did a lot to sully Novell in the eyes of many Linux users, and Novell's decision to link up with the EFF on patents may have been made with an eye towards getting some of its street cred back with the OSS community.'"

Comments

Doesn't really work like that

[26199]

For me, at least, there aren't any second chances. The great thing about the Linux market is there's plenty of choice. Why choose Novell now?

I won't be.

(Same idea behind not buying Sony ever again.)

Same Old Story - With a Different Beat

[Bob9113]

Husband sleeps with his secretary. Wife finds out. He buys her a Tiffany's bracelet. For some wives it's the bracelet that matters. For some it's the remorse (or lack thereof). For some there is no uncheating. Same story here.

They should be in our good graces...

[dteichman2]

Novell worked out a deal with Microsoft. Novell got a big bucket-o-cash, and Microsoft got what still seems to amount to nothing.

Now with this, it seems like two things are true.

1.) Novell costs Microsoft money.
2.) Novell actively works against Microsoft.

Awesome

Re:They should be in our good graces...

[apokryphos]

That's nonsense. Novell have made it explicitly clear, and since they have, the only thing it possibly does is make Microsoft look silly (as they regularly do). Although you clearly don't want to admit it, this deal has been very beneficial for Novell (and, in turn, Linux), and it's hardly like Microsoft have used the deal to begin their campaign on Linux infringing on MS's patents -- that has always (ALWAYS) been around.

> if they knew how the deal would likely be perceived in practice, such a statement is likely to be meaningless or just legal ass-covering.

The only people who perceive it that way are some Microsoft speakers and a few clueless people in the Linux community. I haven't seen any indication anywhere else to suggest otherwise.

The reason 99% of the people (and, I know this from direct experience) in the Linux community are annoyed about this is because there's some (as usual) very vocal poisonous people in the community who spute out countless of erroneous negative headlines without even knowing what's going on. Others in the community see these headlines, think the headlines alone are evidence, and don't even consider the matter. I mean, the amount of people I've seen who think that Novell have some immunity from Microsoft (completely false), or the amount of people I've seen who think that countless of people have left Novell because of this (when only two have permanently left), or the amount of people who think that Novell is losing money from this (when they're getting a few hundred million), or the amount of people who have no clue about Novell's hundreds of Linux engineers in the open source community (KDE, GNOME, Linux kernel, OpenOffice.org, etc), is always astounding.

It's an unfortunate simple fact: people like fighting for a cause when the ideal (freedom) is good, even when there's no threat to it or they're ignorant of who the enemy is.

This headline is nothing new from Novell (I mean, they're an OIN founding member), but people will still interpret it in a silly way.

Mythbusters...

[hoojus]

They could make a show called Patent busters where they could test patents and mark them as Plausible, Prior Art or Laughable. Then to keep in the spirit of Mythbusters they could use explosions by blowing up the companies that try to sue based on Prior art or laughable patents.

Re:All this shows

[giorgiofr]

Why does one always have to make this kind of choice? OSS vs MS, MS is t3h debul, wtf... Every time I build a system I assess its needs and choose the right OS for the job. Sometimes it's Win, sometimes it's Lin, sometimes it's BSD, but *never* does it become a religious matter. Why do you, and many other people, make one out of such trivial issues as what OS to use?