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Novell Proclaims 'We're Not SCO' and We Won't Sue
E5Rebel writes "Novell has promised not to sue anybody over the Unix copyrights that a US court last week ruled it owned. They said there was no Unix in Linux and now they are sticking by it. Perhaps they had no option, but Novell deserve praise for taking on the fight with SCO...."
Essentially, they can't. Novell doesn't own all the copyrights to the Unix source code. Some of the code was developed outside of AT&T by outside vendors. And then there's the whole BSDi case, which has already put the copyrights that Novell does own in a tenuous position. The judge in that case was about this *thumb and forefinger* close to invalidating AT&T's copyrights due to attribution requirements (remember, much of the old code was written before the U.S. signed onto the Berne Convention, which removed attribution requirements) and that's the real reason AT&T/Bell Labs settled with BSDi.
But, the ancient Unix V7 sources were already released under BSD long ago by none other than Caldera.
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Sure is. I take it you're being sarcastic, but you really are precluded from suing someone if they rely on your promise not to sue them. The legal doctrine is called 'promissory estoppel' and has been invoked by IBM in the SCO case already, IIRC.
Please do some research before absurd claims. Let me list a few of the Linux contributions Novell has made you might have heard of. 1. YaST 2. XGL/Compiz 3. Ximian 4. Mono 5. Beagle 6. Bandit 7. iFolder Plus the boatload of patches and drivers they've contributed, and the Linux devs they pay that write software for "Linux" not specifically SuSE. Novell is right there with Sun, Intel, Dell, Redhat, HP & the other big open source contributers. They give away SuSE (OpenSuSE), and not only that, IMO Novell has done more than any other firm to bring Linux to the enterprise desktop.
Whoa! That's not how I remember it, and I was one of the original employees of Caldera. Caldera was started by Bryan Sparks, who recruited Ransom and other Novell people to spin out "Secret Project X" into its own standalone startup. "Secret Project X" was a Novell project to create a *nix-based desktop OS, using Linux as the base OS. Bryan has tried to do this with UnixWare, but ran into problems.
Novell rejected the idea of building a Linux-based desktop OS in 1993, which was too bad. It was a bit galling to see Novell get back into the Linux business a full 10 years later, after squandering what could have been an early lead. The decision pre-dated Windows 95, which was arguably where the Redmond Windows monopoly began, so history could have been different.
Would-a, Could-a, Should-a...
Copyright isn't a problem; Novell are distributing Linux themselves under the GPL, which is all the licence anyone needs. Patents might be another matter... but if that particular balloon ever goes up then the American software industry will self-destruct in quarrelling over who infringed who. Not sure anyone wants to start that off.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
http://en.opensuse.org/Novell_Supported_Projects
Shows a bit more then the few you stated.
Although SuSE (now openSUSE and SLES/SLED) was always available for free, Novell has taken it up a notch by making YaST GPL, opening the development and it goes beyond RedHat by giving you the tool to make your own openSUSE based distriobution with the tool Rembrand that removes branding.
So you could have your own SUSES-CentOS.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.