Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat CEO Talked Patents with MS
c3ph45 writes "Before the Novel-Microsoft deal, Red Hat was in talks with Microsoft over patents. Thankfully, the deal fell apart before Novel made their infamous partnership with Microsoft. As has been reported before, Red Hat doesn't plan to enter into any patent agreements with Microsoft, but it leaves open the question: What if both Red Hat and Novell had entered into such deals? One large vendor doing so has caused enough disruption. How would the community have coped with two of the largest vendors doing so?"
We would have coped the same as always, we would rant and rave and generally work ourselves into a tizz, then get back onto our normal day jobs.
liqbase
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Guys Szulik basically gave no comment which has been interpreted as an affirmation. If he did 'talk' patents, he probably talked about how Microsoft's vaporpatents don't scare him. RH isn't going to make a deal like Novell did, period. You're way overreacting.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
We have Debian. The community existed before commercial interests took notice of us and we do not need any commercial vendor. SUSE, RedHat, and any other commercial vendor could file for bankruptcy without affecting the GNU/Linux community at all. Our power lies in cooperation, volunteerism, and our love for free software. We don't need money to keep our community alive, because it is based on ideology and love for technology. I moved all of my SUSE-based servers and machines to Debian after the Novell patent deal.
Red Hat's management would be negligent if they didn't discuss potential patent infringments with the competition. That doesn't mean they're talking about a Novell-style deal, though. I suspect MS appreoached them and said "we think you're infinging our patents, what are you going to do about it". RH probably replied with "...and you're infringing these patents held by OIN". That leads to a discussion between the two parties. Discussion != agreement. Why he can't just come out and say that, I don't know.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Perhaps because every comment made in public may come back to haunt you someday in court. The prudent manager or attorney is very circumspect about public statements. I suspect that in the end game, SCO will learn just a little bit about this area of conduct.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The way I see it, only entering a patent deal is not necessary bad. (except for giving MS money and FUD ammo.) The problems only starts the moment you include patented stuff into GPL'd software.
Without the patent deal, if you by mistake include patented stuff, you will anger the authors of free software AND risk being sued to death by Microsoft. With the deal, MS can't touch you. You only have to find a way to please the authors of any GPL'd code you may have distributed. History has shown that if it only was an honest mistake, they tend to have small demands. Just remove the offending code and everyone will most likely be happy.
Novell etc are hurting their human-to-human relationships with the community and (to the extent that the deals they do violate GPLv2 and GPLv3) they hurt their ability to continue to legally distribute GNU/Linux, but the contributions they've made are irrevocably made under whatever license they distributed their contributions under - these contributions don't become invalid if they violate the license on parts of GNU/Linux that were contributed by others.
He would have been negligent if he didn't talk to MS. In the end, he probably made the correct decision.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Disclosure: I work on the Fedora Project. I am employed by Red Hat, but I am not in corporate communications. However, here is the official statement that was issued by that group:
"Red Hat has only recently been able to see some of the terms of the original Microsoft/Novell deal, due to the belated and redacted SEC filings that were made. Based on what we have seen, the deal is not interesting to us. Red Hat continues to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency."
My own thoughts, that are not necessarily those of my employer:
CEOs have to be very careful about what they say in public, especially in this day and age in the US business world. Sometimes a "no comment" is the only safe answer. Personally, I do not believe Red Hat would ever make a Novell-style deal. I can't even begin to express how angry and disappointed I would be with Red Hat, and Mr. Szulik, if such a deal were to ever happen. But I don't stay up at night worrying about it, because I trust Red Hat's CEO and top management to do the right thing.
Note that each of these MS "agreements" are cash-positive to the open source side. Also note that neither MS nor the open source company gets anything of tremendous value. The MS patents are unspecified, of dubious enforceability, and the "protection" is limited. The only real threat from open source is to give away functionality that matches or exceeds what MS is selling. Even with the agreements, the threats to both sides remain pretty much the same.
The end game is for MS to try and sell the concept that open source uses something that MS must be paid for. None of this would pass the giggle test, so MS pays the open source companies to suppress their laughter. The real test comes when MS tries to use the precedent of these agreements to impose a tax on open source, via a new round of "agreements" in which the cash flows the other way.
This is MS' attempt to buy the open source industry. Until recently, it was considered impossible -- the community is too large and too diverse to be bought. Evidently, MS thinks there are some common choke points that would hinder open source development. We all know that cash is a very effective tool to influence corporate behavior. This is either very clever or very desperate -- I'm not sure which.
I would say that Red Hat and other companies are probably in talks with Microsoft all the time. If they are not, they probably should be. Both companies have customers that use both sets of products, so it is in everyone's interest to communicate and to improve interoperability between distinct, independent products.
I do not see Red Hat caving in and signing any kind of patent agreement, but I could easily see Red Hat working with Microsoft if the work was in their mutual interest and in the interest of customers.
Red Hat is probably very reluctant to make those kind of deals because we have seen the kind of press Microsoft has given so far - stuff like "We will not sue this partner", yet in another breath that same day, "We think that Linux infringes on..." ad nauseum.
I do not think anyone's software should rightly infringe on anything else, because ninety percent of functions are common functions that should not be possible to patent, protect, or license, but there could be open collaborations to share the cost and benefits of implementing new features and improving the interoperability of existing features.
What we have today is a bunch of baloney. I hope all of it comes to an end soon and we usher in a new generation of collaborative software. Before that happens, there is likely to be quite a bit more nonsense, but perhaps we will get there sooner rather than later after all.
Brian Masinick, masinick at yahoo dot com Linux
The problem with the NRA is that they say they need guns to fight off tyranny but essentially define tyranny as not having guns.
There is no problem with the NRA. As for tyranny and firearms, almost if not every population that was tyrannized was disarmed first. This is true even for the 1980s and 1990s. For instance Iran, after the Iranian revolution the Ayatllahs left people alone at first. The Revolutionary Guard then sponsered a program wherein for every firearm a person brought in they were given enough food for a family of 4 for a month, or something like that. Once the populace was disarmed the Revolutionary Guard started cracking down on the populace. How about Rwanda? Once again the populace was disarmed before the genocide started there. Take Sudan today though there has been an ongoing civil war, Darfur is where the population isn't armed, yet is where most of the bloodshed is and entire villages burned down. In the south however where rebel groups are armed still they don't have villages being destroyed.
FalconShould there be a Law?