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Novell Goes Public with Microsoft Linux Deal
InfoWorldMike writes "On the back of defending the agreement this week, Novell did as promised and published details of its landmark November 2006 Linux partnership agreements with Microsoft. Linux advocates are expected to scour the documents for signs of how the agreement may affect Linux and whether anything in it will put Microsoft or Novell in potential violation of the upcoming version 3 of the GNU General Public license (GPL). The GPL is used in licensing many components of the Linux operating system. Open-source advocate Bruce Perens said he would be looking to see exactly what Novell was given through the deal and whether there is any requirement for the Linux vendor to defend Microsoft's patent claims. 'What I'm actually looking for is, to what extent was there a violation of faith?' he said."
Whether people like it or not, whether the deal goes on as planned or not, or whether this in any way violates GPL, the damage is unfortunately already done - and not necessarily because of any effects that may come out of the agreement. The real damage is that the very thought this agreement will cause Stallman to pretty much COMPLETELY lose it, in the flying-blind-in-the-land-of-batshit kind of way. I can't imagine his behavior will get more reasonable anyway, and with his credibility already stretched and the tensions already rife within the community, it doesn't bode well. Open infighting amongst the FOSS community is just what we need right now......
Well, they explicitly exempted OpenOffice and StarOffice, which I presume means that otherwise they would have been covered. If OpenOffice is a "clone" of MS Office, then I think you can cover just about anything competing in the same market.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not now it isn't, but did Microsoft retain any rights to Xenix?
...Novell and Microsoft agree to provide a combined offering consisting of SLES and a subscription for SLES support with Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Viridian. It looks like Microsoft has given up and just started naming their products appropriately....and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
It's worth noting 3.4:
3.4 No Acknowledgement of Infringement. Nothing in this Agreement shall imply, or be construed as an admission or acknowledgement by a Party, that any Patents of the other Party are infringed, valid or enforceable.
Which will hopefully finally put an end to all the nonsense conspiracy theories that "Novell admitted that Linux infringes patents" etc., even though Novell have constantly re-iterated that such a claim was ridiculous. As I've said several times before, blaming Novell for Microsoft's recent claims is just completely unfounded, and in fact there's nothing new or particularly recent about it; Microsoft have always been flooding the market with falsities about Linux's infringement on their patents.
Hopefully the published results will provide the community with a general better understanding of the deal, so that at least if they disagree/hate it, they do it for real reasons (which seems to be rare).
In the new dawn emerging from the FOSS revolution we are finally getting what we really need to move technology forward: light. These back room deals for contingent permission to use intangible ideas and leverage market share will not stand the light of day. All deals are eventually exposed. This leads to some business ethics lessons that should have been the standard all along:
Now let us set out to innovate good products and sell them on their merits, m'k?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Bully for you! You manage to lead a pure and Justified existence, unsullied by any contamination of anything from Microsoft.
Unfortunately, if you hadn't noted from your Edenic paradise of FLOSS perfection, a large of PCs (whether work or home, Server or Desktop) run Windows.
This begs a question - how to encourage people and companies to migrate from Windows to GNU/Linux? This just doesn't mean providing desktop environments (Gnome/KDE) but also a way to migrate applications (a big concern for business).
Java is not a problem, but the Microsoft languages (C#.NET and VB.NET) are.
I know what! What is required is someone to help provide an environment where these applications can run in (say) Linux and not just Windows! That way, the path to paradise is not blocked for all those people and companies using stuff developed with Microsoft technologies. Is there such a person? Is there such a Project? Why, goodness me, there is; Mono, with Miguel as main developer.
Of course, you may not want Gnu/Linux to become mainstream. If so, may I humbly disagree.
(Oh, and a query, How will you avoid all the stuff that the Suse folk put into the kernel? They're still at it as well, by the way, looking at the latest change logs. Maybe you should use Hurd instead. I've heard it's very pure and unsullied!)
Sesostris III
(PS, I currently dual boot with Ubuntu, having always used KDE before, and I must admit I like it. As mentioned by someone else, there is Kubuntu if you prefer KDE. Xubuntu if you prefer neither!)
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Microsoft has become one of the biggest sellers of Linux and Linux support by this deal. Microsoft saw that many customers were going to use Linux based servers for specific applications anyway(an internal blog based on LAMP, for example).so Microsoft retains the customer while contracting out the support to Novell.
Novell gains revenue with the support contract OEM from Microsoft, Microsoft retains customer loyalty (and a cut of the support contract) and is able to sell "total solutions". Microsoft sees future revenue in customer support.
The patent stuff is more of a red herring in this deal. It is basically there to ease the deal. The main idea is that Microsoft gets to sell more stuff to customers and Novell gets more revenue. It is a win/win deal for both of them.
Tyrants may be unavoidable, but you can reduce their scope and their power. If a project can be forked at need, then "absolute control over the code base" means until people get so upset that a group forms to fork the code. This can take lots of provocation, but X Window experienced just such an event a year or two ago.
OpenSuSE may mean that Novell is already facing a quiet insurrection. It also may not. (I'm not a SUSE user, so I haven't been following them. But even if it doesn't mean that now, it could change to mean that at any time.)
Guido may have the title "Benevolent Dictator For Life", but if enough people got unhappy with his decisions, a new language would fork off of Python. (It doesn't even require that someone be unhappy. Greg Ewing could decide to develop Pyrex into a full language rather than leaving it to be an intermediate between Python and C, and that would do it in and of itself.)
So there are lots of "Petty tyrants", both benevolent and otherwise. In the FOSS community their power over each person is generally quite limited.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, the conspiracy theory going around was that Novell agreed to those claims as well even though they've continuously denied it. That this deal hasn't been good for Novell is another myth a lot of people apparently like believing, curiously enough. While in actual fact Novell's stocks have gone up, they've got quite a few more Linux engineers than before, and SLE adoption is greatly increasing. Not exactly doing badly, are they?