Turbolinux Is Latest To Sign Microsoft Pact

mytrip sends word that Turbolinux has followed Novell, Linspire, and Xandros in signing a patent and technology agreement with Microsoft. Microsoft pledged not to sue Turbolinux's users for patent infringement. Turbolinux, headquartered in Japan, sells Linux systems mostly in emerging markets such as China and India. The Betanews story speculates on some of the technology benefits Turbolinux might get out of the deal.

Comments

Re:Money ?

[jbengt]

ACtually, the way I heard it, MS gave wads of cash to Novell for patents.
Because MS sells so much more than Novell, in balance they owed more to Novell for the use of Novell's IP than Novell owed to MS for the use of MS's IP.

Re:Turbolinux?

[trolltalk.com]

... and that's why they did the deal - attention. The article say's they're big in Asia, but they're not, and their other forays into things like "appliances" didn't work.

Just another linux company slowly sliding into obscurity as other linux distros make get larger and more capable by the day. This market rationalization will end up with a few major distros ready to take on Redmond head-to-head - and win.

Small distros will still continue to exist, to serve their market niches where warranted, and not as "me to" linux.

Re:huh?

[awrowe]

Problem is, the more small players who sign up to this sort of thing, the harder it is to refute claims made in court. If you add up all the users of these 'small'distro's' what sort of percentage are we looking at of total linux users? Even more pertinent perhaps, is that if lots of these tiddlers signed up and a Microsoft sock puppet decided to go to the courts citing '359 distributions have signed our agreement but these five or six recalcitrant organisations think they are too big to worry about the law', what happens then? The courts they are going to aren't necessarily tech savvy. The sock puppet will try very hard to obfuscate the number of users in the non-signing distros and will instead try to highlight the number of organisations who do sign. At that point, it doesn't come down to users, but to distributors and when that happens, the sock puppet wins on numbers. This is more dangerous than it looks. Microsoft wouldn't be going after the tiddlers if they didn't have a strategy like this.