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Red Hat Rejects Microsoft Deals

Posted by Zonk on from the don't-tread-on-this-penguin dept.

Kurtz'sKompund passed us an article detailing another loss in Microsoft's licensing push: Red Hat has summarily rejected Redmond's offer of an alliance. The article also touches on Ubuntu's rejection of the same offer, which we discussed this past weekend. ZDNet reports on comments from Mark Shuttleworth and the Red Hat organization, with Shuttleworth stating "Allegations of 'infringement of unspecified patents' carry no weight whatsoever. We don't think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together." Red Hat was even more blunt, stating the organization refused to pay an "innovation tax" to Microsoft. "Red Hat said there would be no such deal. Referring to previous statements distancing itself from Microsoft, the company insisted: 'Red Hat's standpoint has not changed.' The company referenced a statement written when Microsoft revealed it was partnering with Novell, saying that its position remained unaltered. Red Hat director of corporate communications Leigh Day added: 'We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency.' Many open-source followers argue that Red Hat, as the largest Linux vendor, would have a lot to lose from partnering with Microsoft."

4 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. And so did Mandriva by dotpavan · · Score: 5, Informative

    from their corp announcement

  2. Re:And if they did partner... by pembo13 · · Score: 3, Informative

    others have: Novel, Xandros, Linspire

    --
    "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
  3. Re:Probably drivers by kasperd · · Score: 4, Informative

    I suspect that MS will wind up using partnerships with hardware vendors to write proprietary Linux hardware drivers, release them binary-only and compile them into the kernels of their minion-distributions by default, thus giving the sell-out distros an functional advantage over the pure distros.
    Doing so would be a very clear violation of copyright. If anybody starts selling such a distribution, I predict they will receive a cease and desist letter from some Linux developers. (I might consider writing it myself, but probably some larger contributor would do so before me).

    Furthermore, users of the pure distros won't be able to swipe or reverse-engineer the binaries without being at risk for infringement lawsuits.
    That depends on where they live. There are countries that have a law that clearly states such reverse engineering is legal, and the right to reverse engineer cannot be given up by a contract.

    In effect you are suggesting that the copyright violator sues the copyright owners over something the owners does with their own code, which would be legal in many parts of the world even if they didn't own the code in the first place.
    --

    Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  4. Re:Bye-bye Red Hat by Cyberax · · Score: 4, Informative

    RedHat sells support. And it's a DAMN GOOD support - much better than from MS. We had a problem with IPX/SPX network stack in W2K3 and it took ages to debug and resolve problem.

    But when we had a problem with SAMBA on Linux (winbindd did not work well) - it was resolved in little less than an hour with RedHat support.

    As for mission-critical apps - usually you can run them under emulation. We have a couple of legacy apps working happily in Xen. And of course, Linux can interoperate quite nicely with Windows, so you can have mixes Windows/Linux environment.