Slashdot Mirror
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...."
Then it wouldn't hurt to put any and all software they own the copyrights to under the BSD license or even release them to the public domain. If they aren't going to sue anyone who infringes on their copyrights, then they might as well release the code under a permissive license
I guess they are trying to rebuild goodwill they lost with the MS deal. Oh well, in either case this is a welcome announcement so at least they can get some praise for that one. Seems they realise just how bad they screwed up at least ...
...legally binding? I had no idea.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
The game.
This is why I read slashdot. Where else do you find editors with such mental agility that they can completely contradict themselves in the mere space of 16 words?
From the mysterious future, I bring you this headline:
Sweden launches nubile virgins straight into the heart of the Sun. After all, it shines on us every day. I mean, it doesn' exactly have much else to do, but we need an empty reason to express gratitude. Thank you Sweden for honoring the Sun's contribution to our civilization.
The Banjo Players Must Die!
So many thousands of 'engineers' have got the Certified Novell Engineer certification... millions of devices have been designed around Netware.. and Novell has simply ditched them all.
If they will not maintain and enhance Netware, they ought to atleast Open Source the damn thing; maybe even GPL it. Netware and NDS have been very good pieces of work, and abandoning them has worked to Microsoft's and Intel's advantage.
With Netware, Novell was pretending to be a competitor to Microsoft's DOS and Xenix; with SuSE even the pretence of competing in the OS market has gone - it is now an unholy 'partnership'.
Novell's promise "Not To Sue" will not win them more customers for SuSE Linux. Customers will go in for Linux distros not tainted by Novell, Ximian Xandros etc.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
They are saying they own their patents, and they won't go after you as a Linux user. What more do you really want? They may be able to make money off the patents in other ways. They are a business after all. Holding the MS deal against them for eternity is dumb as well.
Why is that necessary when we already have GNU? Let the proprietary folks keep their gig. Diversity is supposed to be healthy isn't it? One ought to have options in both code ANDlicenses if one is truly free.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
The summary includes a slam (or two, depending on how you count) against Novell.
I have to say that despite my initial skepticism back when they bought it, I have come to believe that Novell has done a far better job throughout every part of their stewardship of the UNIX copyrights than anyone would have expected. Remember that when they acquired it the lawsuit over BSD was still ongoing... and the first thing that Novell said about it was that they would rather compete in the market than in court. Lawsuits have momentum, so it took a while to wind down, but the final settlement was remarkably positive: CSRG had to remove a token - three files - and Novell agreed not to sue anyone using the resulting code base.
I also had the opportunity to use UNIXware from Novell, and it was a solid release of System V... far better than SCO's awful version.
After their vigorous and aggressive response to SCO's actions, I think they deserve better than this.
Anyway, once Caldera started all the layoffs after the dot-com boom and SCO merge, a good chunk of engineering ended up at Novell.
I think that one phrase tells you a lot about why SCO sued people and Novell won't: Novell is a functioning business with a business plan.
The reason SCO sued, apparently, is because they were failing as a business and they went into meltdown-mode. The people running the show seemed to give up on any prospect of maintaining a sustainable business, and instead focussed on getting whatever they could as soon as they could, future of the company be damned. They made a deal with the devil and started attacking their own potential customers.
You can tell a business is in trouble if they start attacking their own customers. Even the most retarded businessman doesn't want his own customers to hate him.
Oh come on! There's the Microsoft-shilling-ISO problem to report on yet, Groklaw is in the thick of that! Don't forget who funded the SCO attack, Microsoft are not yet defeated, that was just one maneuvre. Meaning there's the end-game of Microsoft's patent FUD attack on GNU+Linux to report, might even be a court case in it too.
I think the site is well established, too many people like PJ's pithy analysis for Groklaw to disappear. Although I doubt your post was serious, it's still worth pointing out all the things the site could do in the weeks, months and years to come. :)
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
So Novell tried to offer something that they felt would distinguish their product from others
But if Linux does NOT violate Microsoft's patents
Yeah, that's doing "the right thing" for "their customers".
That seems contradictory to me. Why sign a deal with Microsoft if there isn't any violation?
Why not simply state that Novell offers "indemnification" for any and all violations of their products? Because Novell believes Linux is clean and Free. No deal needed with Microsoft.
And if Novell is so noble, why did they immediately start pushing their "protection" as something NEEDED by Linux users and ONLY available from Novell?
Why Novel doesn't Open Source Netware it is probably because they can't. Espectially with the GNU. I am sure it is filled with stuff purchased from Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, perhaps even SCO, as well a bunch of other places. It will be way to expensive to put it out in open source and impossible with GPL and even more impossible with GPL 3.
Secondly security threw obscurity Because Netware isn't a huge market seller there probably isn't a lot of people trying to hack in it. But by releasing the source people see that there is a hole for a Master Password or something the systems with Netware running will be volnerable. But I doubt there will be enough comunity support to fix the bugs to make it a secure product.
Third while it is probably a break even product it is better to keep your customers then loose them, just for keeping their contact information is valuable. At some point they may migrate off of Netware if you have a nice linux solution they just may go back to you and buy it. If Netware was open source you could loose some customers as contact and will just go free use only downloading without dealing with novel. Thus when they feel like they need to move off they have no alegence with novel and lost much of the contact information so their choices for competing products are equal.
Forth it is best not to keep all your eggs in the same basket. There are people who may not like the other offerings and they are still worried about Open Source so Novel has an option for them. Also if they are going to make a new product iNetWere that is closed source they still have private IP that they can use for the project, giving them a competivie advantage.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In any case, they are a functioning business with a business plan, which was my only claim. Even if we assume that they've written no code and engineered no product, they were at least hiring people, which is a sign that they intended to.
But they wouldn't have a case. You see, when you get SuSE, you get permission to use Novell's code under the GPL. Novell give that license to you. To anyone. So, any other distro can remove any GPL'ed code they have that could infringe on Novell, get the code same code from Novell under the GPL, and re-add it to their distro, ending up with the same distro they started up with down to the last line of code.
In other words: AS LONG AS NOVELL ARE DISTRIBUTING THEIR OWN CODE UNDER THE GPL, ANYBODY HAVING THAT CODE IN THEIR DISTRO IS OBEYING THE FRACKING LAW. THERE IS NO CASE!
Damn, I got tired of this nonsense.
As much as I dislike Novell for dealing with MS, I have to agree that apart from that they have contributed quite a bit to open source. A good chunk of their engineers work on open source software when they have their spare time at work. Not as much as the likes of Google but still a contribution to say the least.
Correction: *was* judged by 20 years ago -
this predates the original and now-outdated posix "standard" by ~3 or 4 years
you probably wouldn't *want* anything in SYSV -
would you want these great features:
drivers for 8MHZ AT&T 3B2 computers? maybe - netbsd port anyone?
outdated VM algorithms? nope
crappy SMP support (*maybe* 2CPU scalability)? nope
no threading? nope
outdated UFS filesystem? nope
ancient 4BSD TCP/IP with lots of security holes? nope
maybe some stuff from the userland like Korn shell & updated "real" troff,
another outdated open source but commercial-ish quality C compiler / debugger
could be useful, but not really that cool.
it would probably only be useful as a historical example or to 'update' for
80's hardware with US-Made Western Electric processors..
So why make the statement at all? Very simple. Say there is a gun held by someone (SCO) in a room full of people; the gun is used in a threatening way. Then the gun is moved to another person's control (Novell). To get everybody to calm down as quickly as possible, the second person shows that the gun isn't loaded anyhow, and then puts it away in some drawer. That is essentially what Novell did: tell people that there is no threat whatsoever, in the most direct way possible. This is necessary because the people in the room, on edge from the previous threats, are still worried by the gun.
Best punchline revision ever :D
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?