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?"

Comments

Re:Mass hysteria

[metamatic]

And the problem with the NRA is that people say "Yeah! We should all have guns so that we can fight off tyranny!"

And then when innocent people are being sent to concentration camps, the president declares himself above the law, habeas corpus is suspended, free speech is corralled into "zones", and protestors are illegally rounded up, all these blowhard defenders of freedom sit around drinking beer and polishing their useless firearms.

Same way it did with Novell

[metamatic]

It's important to understand that "the community" by and large doesn't run Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SuSE Linux Enterprise (Server|Desktop), so Novell and RedHat license agreements simply don't affect them. Perhaps a RedHat agreement with Microsoft would have caused yet more ill will and sped up the decline of Fedora, but that's about it.

Now, what would really impact the community would be if Ubuntu signed a Microsoft deal. But fortunately, that's not gonna happen. And even if it did, we'd still have Debian.