Microsoft Gives Xandros Users Patent Protection

DigDuality writes "Microsoft, shrugging off licensing moves to prevent it from repeating its controversial patent deal with Novell, has signed a set of broad collaboration agreements with Linux provider Xandros that include an intellectual property assurance under which Microsoft will provide patent covenants for Xandros customers."

Comments

Here we go again....

[vwjeff]

Wow. Show me the patents or shut up.

Re:Here we go again....

[vux984]

.it's safe to say they lost at least a handful of customers as a result.

But its not like those customers became Microsoft customers. Or even abandoned linux. The only abandoned Novell.

here we go again...

[theTrueMikeBrown]

I am of the opinion that Microsoft will continue to push the boundary as long as it is around.

I don't really know if this is 'news'. Expecting people to be too surprised at this is sort of like saying "Hey, everybody, another person was killed in the middle east today" and expecting to get responses like "Wow, I didn't see that one coming!" or "You gotta be kidding."

Disambiguation

[Dachannien]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection

Anybody care to suggest which of those articles is applicable?

Two down, how many to go?

[pieterh]

With Novell, Microsoft subsidised Novell Suse licenses. With Xandros, Microsoft is doing a deal to provide "patent covenants", which means protection being sued by Microsoft for patent claims that Microsoft has not actually specified.

The game is to knock down the commercial Linux vendors, one by one, and establish them all as clients of Microsoft's "intellectual property". You can bet that the pressure on Red Hat to settle is quite intense. First, their competitors are being subsidised. Second, their clients are being blackmailed.

I've written a more detailed analysis on this. Microsoft is using software patents to try to take ownership of GNU/Linux and all free software / open source that would be distributed along with it.

Divide and conquer. At the end, the volunteer distros will be left alone to do their work, contributing to the shiny new future, while Microsoft makes sure it gets its 10%.

GPLv3 is being seen as many in the industry as the answer. I think that's wishful thinking. The real answer here is a lawsuit from the government for abuse of monopoly power, where Microsoft is using its monopoly in the desktop area to interfere in the server OS market.

On a related tangent it seems that the Redmond astro-turfing drones are out in force, insulting RMS, calling the GPLv3 all kinds of names, claiming that "freedom" includes the right to abuse other people. Well, drones, suck it. Doesn't matter how much you scream and rant, how much your managers pay you to mess with ISO and push OOXML, Microsoft is either going to learn to "do no evil", or it's going to sink like the Titanic.

Re:Two down, how many to go?

[pieterh]

Bizarre. IHBT, but I'll bite.

My firm makes its money thanks to the GPL. If we did not use that license - for which RMS has earned my eternal gratitude - firms would simply steal our free software without giving anything back. The GPL ensures that we can earn money from our hard work by selling commercial licenses. What kind of business model do you see for "the community" you claim to be part of...?

As for "the tatters of our credibility", you are blaming RMS for a problem that is not there. Free software has never had a higher credibility.

I'll tell you who has lousy credibility... it's ACs who pretend to be part of a community. GNU-slash ruined Debian for you, did it? I'm so sorry for your fragile world.

Re:Patents?

[Bruce Perens]

Consider the difference between from and to.

Protection racket?

[INT_QRK]

So in Brooklyn, for example, Fingers and Lucky come into your restaurant one day and demand a weekly payment in return for which nothing bad happens to your business or your cute little kids. See the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering,quoting definition of Racket, quoting the article: "...best-known is the protection racket, in which criminals demand money from businesses in exchange for the service of "protection" against crimes that the racketeers themselves instigate if unpaid..." So is there a *RICO case here? * RICO (from the same article) "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (18 U.S.C. 1961-1968)...allowed law enforcement to charge a person or group with racketeering, defined as committing multiple violations of certain varieties within a 10 year period.... purpose..."the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce."

Re:I don't, and I'll tell you why

[mrchaotica]

The point I'm trying to wake is that it MS makes enough shills, they'll become the "community." The GPLv2 fork could become the dominant one.

Re:How much were they paid?

[Ngarrang]

They know their standing in the community is going to take a hit. So, how much was it worth to them? And this his Microsoft is showing how smart it is. It is using the very divisiveness that exists in the open-source community against to attack Linux. The SCO lawsuits have failed. The patents threats are being laughed at. So, pay someone a bunch of money, give them a promise of lawsuit protection and voila, watch a small portion of the community shut that vendor out. Then, target the next distro. Even if this isn't Microsoft's plan, it is working out this way. The Microsoft community shows more cohesiveness than this, which is their strength.

Re:I like these deals

[Grishnakh]

I used to be a big SuSE fan, starting way back in 1999. My last SuSE version was 10.1.

Now I'm using Kubuntu.

As for the OpenSUSE apologists, no thanks. OpenSUSE still exists at Novell's whim, using Novell's resources. Why use that when you can use a distro that has nothing to do with MS?

Re:How much were they paid?

[bigpat]

Well, I think this has just become a running joke. I think it is much more than just "the Linux community" that thinks Microsoft is full of shit with their lies and marketing ploys.

Microsoft continues to lose all credibility as anything other than a "me too" technology company. Microsoft makes money on the kickbacks it dishes out to idiot CIOs and by its policy of designing vendor lock-in into everything they make, not on the merits of their products.

Smart CIOs would ban MS products from the office, not standardize on them.

Jumping from the bush leagues to "The Show"

[rbrander]

Remember how the movie "Bull Durham" emphasized what a dramatic jump it is from the bush leagues to what they called "The Show", the majors?

Xandros and a dozen other of what Mr. Perens posted above as "struggling" Linux distributions are struggling because people like myself (MEPIS man, 3 years) consider their $50 or $100 OS price a Grave Decision and hopscotch through various distros (Mandrake, Lycoris and Linspire for me) and probably settle on a totally free one. Like me.

So Xandros and many others have gone over a decade unable to ever meet payroll for more people that can gather around one conference table, with growth flattening after they reach a base of a few thousand home users, a couple of dozen minor corporate installs and perhaps a couple of larger ones.

Then MS comes along, and it's not the direct cash so much as the mere prospect of a CHANCE of being seen as a Serious Corporate Solution that might, just might now get picked up by a couple or six dozen larger installs in the hundreds of desktops each. Slashdot readers might not be scared of the patent boogeyman but the larger a company is, the more averse it is to the prospect of such risks, however small. To them, a volume purchase price of $25 per desktop is very, very cheap insurance against even spending one legal-staff-week on a lawsuit threat.

So a company like Xandros can "offend" a free software community that has been collectively sending it a few hundred thousand a year at most to grab a shot at the brass ring of joining "The Show" and selling thousands of installs to big corporations. Like a baseball player taking a longshot at "The Show" even if it burns all bridges back to the bush leagues.

You can blame them but you should also see their point of view.

Re:Question

[Bruce Perens]

I think that Microsoft is making sweetheart deals with failing Linux distributions so that it can support its political stance in favor of increases in software patenting. They are using Xandros to drive Microsoft's campaign to create a situation in which any competing product must somehow be infringing of Microsoft, or at least is believed to be infringing of Microsoft.

Xandros didn't have the money to pay Microsoft for this. They were dying anyway.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:I like these deals

[molarmass192]

Ditto ... we had several SuSE licenses, they're slated to be replaced by RHEL5 by the end of the year. It was mostly my call to make, all it took was a quick slide show to management stating how SuSE was entering into a licensing agreement with MS, threatening the continuity of their SuSE Linux line, and approval to migrate to RHEL5 was a done deal. In the end, this is a good thing, it focuses resources back towards RH who really have maintained their stance on the GPL all along. If anybody is going to go to the mat for Linux, it'll be RH.

Re:How much were they paid?

[bigpat]

No. A Smart CIO will standardize on MS Office products because the average Joe and Jane knows their ways around Office Suite. No they don't. And if they did, does this mean that people shouldn't upgrade to Office 2007 because it has too many new features? Might as well move to OpenOffice in that case.

Software selection was never about superior technology and morale high ground in the first place. Since when is simply not wanting to get shafted by Microsoft the "morale high ground"? It is pure self interest to want to avoid being stuck with all your corporate information in files that have been purposefully made so that they can only be effectively used with the help of one particular vendor's product. I would be perfectly fine with MS Office if it would simply use the standard OpenDocument format instead of using proprietary add ons.

No, as a corporate CIO I probably wouldn't ban Microsoft products altogether, but like the former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I would make sure that using standard open formats were a primary criteria for software selection. With proprietary formats only being used if no other software was available to fill a need.

Using open formats isn't about taking some moral high ground, it is about business continuity and being able to do what you want with your own assets. Nothing should piss off senior management more than discovering that you can't use the data that your own employees have generated over many years just because Microsoft doesn't support what you want to do.

Re:How much were they paid?

[rvw]

So, pay someone a bunch of money, give them a promise of lawsuit protection and voila, watch a small portion of the community shut that vendor out. Then, target the next distro. Even if this isn't Microsoft's plan, it is working out this way. If MS cleans the weed out of the Linux distros this way, let them. If Red Hat, Slackware and Ubuntu/Debian don't follow, it will make the market a lot more clear, and it will help the "good" distros survive.

Re:How much were they paid?

[MindKata]

"Long term" ... It looks like M$ are playing for the long term.

First we had the M$+Novell stunt. Then the 235 fictitious patents and now the "deal" with Xandros. Its looking ever more likely, this is part of an ongoing serious tactical move by M$ to damage the name of Linux, by implication alone, that its somehow unsafe from legal action, unless licensed by them.

I'll just quickly paste in a section out from my previous /. post on the subject...
"Microsoft could well be using this "patent news" in a very underhanded, but very tactical way to scare corporations away from adopting open source tools and/or OS, in an attempt to tip the balance so corporations buy Vista. Non-technical Corporation bosses would be afraid of this kind of underhanded sabre rattling tactic of Microsoft, as they would fear wasting time and effort on Linux and so go the "safe" route of using Microsoft tools & OS. ("Safe"=What M$ tell them is safe)."

Now with this Xandros move, it looks like its part of a bigger overall strategy. It looks ever more likely this is a much more serious tactical move than just sabre rattling to just sell more copies of Vista.

I can only hope organisations and even governments who use Linux, can quickly take serious legal action against M$ for this strategically very devious mud slinging.

If this isn't stopped fast, M$ are going to scare other Distros into signing up and each that do, add implied weight from a legal perspective, in the eyes of non-technical judges, that something is up with unlicensed Linux. Its a very underhanded strategy to imply something is wrong with Linux.

If enough Distros sign up, then M$ just has to say in court "hey look judge, even these big Distros admit there was something wrong with Linux. So now, we want everyone else to pay up".

Microsoft look like they are playing a very big chess game to win control over Linux and it needs to be stopped fast.