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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...."
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
Reminds me of that Bill Gates joke:
Bill Gates arrives at Heaven's gates and St. Peter tells him that he really doesn't know what to do with Bill. "I mean on one hand you've helped get computers into many homes, but on the other hand you released Windows. I'll give you the choice, heaven or hell?"
Bill thinks about this and asks to be shown both places to make an informed decision on the matter. And so Peter takes him to heaven, replete with clouds, angels, harps and what not. Bill barely manages to stifle a yawn before St. Peter takes him to hell, a fabulous beach with babes playing around. "I've decided I want you to send me to hell," Bill announces.
So a few weeks later St. Peter looks up Bill to see how he's doing. Gates is strung up against a cave passage somewhere, demons all around him whipping and branding him. "And Bill, enjoying yourself?"
Bill grimaces and says: "This isn't what you promised me!"
"Ah," says St. Peter, "you're right. That was the demo."
Indeed!
The real victim in the case, at least now that it's resolved, is GrokLaw. What the hell are they going to do now, without this case to report on!?
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Unix *is* open source. Between *BSD and Solaris, pretty much all the Unix code you might want is available. Seriously - what useful code is in some version of Unix that Novel may hold copyrights for that isn't in *BSD or Solaris?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
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.
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.
They could very easily start up the infringement train and force everyone to use SuSE linux as not to infringe on their IP. They could even sell indemnification licenses, at, oh, say $699 a pop.
And... just like with SCO's retarded license, nobody with a brain would pay for it. And if they tried to enforce it against, say, IBM, then they would find themselves being beaten around by the Nazgul just like SCO was. And subject to many of the same counter-claims that SCO is.
Unlike the SCO case, Novell actually has the resources to put a stranglehold on the community. BUT THEY DIDN'T.
They DIDN'T because they CAN'T, because JUST like in the SCO case, there IS NO INFRINGING CODE IN LINUX. It's not about resources, as SCO had plenty thanks to MS. It's just that they DIDN'T HAVE A CASE. The ruling that SCO doesn't own UNIX copyrights has brought about a quicker end, but that doesn't change the fact that up to this point SCO hasn't produced a single piece of actual evidence of infringement, and Novell, were they to try, couldn't either because IT ISN'T THERE.
So yes, let's all congratulate Novell for not going on a retarded suicide mission of a pointless lawsuit. Having an actual business that makes money, this would be stupid, and Novell isn't that stupid. I commend them for being in touch with reality.
I mean, I don't really have anything bad to say about Novell. But when they say "Oh, we're not going to sue Linux users for infringing UNIX because we're nice guys" you need to look through the transparent PR and translate that as "because we would lose horribly".
The enemies of Democracy are
That's it, I'm switching to Solaris.
sigfault. core dumped.
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.
1) Yeah, and someone will reverse engineer windows and call it something like Winws (Winws Is Not Windows, Stupid), and release it under the GPLv3, and new software will be written for it in GPLv3, and it will run in real Windows too, and then Microsoft will pay. 2) What? 3) If Microsoft has enough money to survive the melting Xbox360 debacle, I hardly think it will be anytime soon that Microsoft is shoved into obscurity. I mean, hell, they survived Windows ME, and I'm sure they'll survive Vista. Personally, I think there's just as much FUD out there about MS as there is about Linux. Oh, right. I'm on slashdot. Die, microsoft!
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.
A real Microsoft joke punchline should go:
"Ah," says St. Peter, "you're right. That was..." 0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
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...