Groklaw Guts the Novell/Microsoft Deal

walterbyrd writes "Pamala Jones, at groklaw, totally rips apart the Novell/Deal patent protection deal. From the article: 'Justin Steinman reveals that to market their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server against Red Hat they ask, "Do you want the Linux that works with Windows? Or the one that doesn't?" It's just appalling. Let me ask you developers who are kernel guys a question: When you contributed code to the kernel, was it your intent that it be used against Red Hat? How about the rest of you developers? Is that all right with you, that your code is being marketed by Novell like that? I also have questions about antitrust issues, with Microsoft being Novell's partner in such deals and sales pitches. Nothing speaks louder about Microsoft's true determination never to be actually interoperable than this conference.'"

Comments

Re:I don't mean to..

[NickFortune]

I think the thing that particularly set her off was Novell's Justin Steinman claiming that "the community was no longer upset about the deal" (quoting PJ, not Steinman). She disagrees, and I think the intention of the article was to bring to a wider audience the way Novell are misrepresenting the situation.

And I have to say, I think it's an valid point. I won't claim that we've been unanimous in condemning Novell, but to claim all the objections are yesterdays news smacks of either deliberate deception, or a worrying detachment from reality.

Either way, it reflects poorly on Novell.

GPL and Intent

[JerryLove]

Let me ask you developers who are kernel guys a question: When you contributed code to the kernel, was it your intent that it be used against Red Hat?

I know it's a small piece of a bigger article: but since when does it matter what someone who submitted something to GPL intended their code to be used for. The licese is explicitly and intentionally designed to allow open-source code to be used for any purpose by anyone, as long as it's credited and open-source. I'm sure there's someone out there who wrote code who thinks cell-phones cause cancer and dislikes his LINUX code running on a cell; or someone who'se pissed about millitary research done on LINUX clusters, or most anything else. It's a really baseless argument intended to appeal more to emotion than reason; and I have to say that I'm prone to dismissing the author based on just such an example.