Novell has a survey on their Cool Solutions web site (at http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tip/18041.html ) asking about reaction to the Novell / Microsoft deal. They aren't asking very much, but do have a comment box as the last item on the survey. Here's how I answered it:
I think that this "deal" between Novell and Microsoft will be, in the long run, a complete disaster for Novell, their customers, Linux users and developers, and the open-source community as a whole. I am reminded of the last Linux vendor, Corel, who made a "deal" with Microsoft; Support, sales, and development of the company's Linux-compatible applications was halted almost immediately afterward and Corel soon divested themselves of their Linux distribution as well.
I have several questions regarding this deal. What, specifically, are the patents which Microsoft feels (and Novell apparently agrees) that Linux or applications in the SUSE Linux distribution are in violation of? Does this patent "protection" extend to all code contributed by Novell to Linux and other open-source projects and does it abide by the terms of section 7 of the GPL for contributions to GPL projects? Will any jointly developed "compatibility" or code for OpenOffice.org be contributed back to that project under the same license terms already in use or will they be for Novell customers only and/or not open source? What are your specific answers to the concerns and questions raised by Pamela Jones at groklaw.net and Bruce Perens at technocrat.net? What, if any, protection will Novell's Linux customers and open source developers have at the end of this agreement?
I have worked with and for Novell dealers and customers since 1985 and have worked with and recommended SuSE Linux for many years as well. Novell has indicated in their announcements that they have made this "deal" as a way of placing customers' concerns first. This completely ignores the fact that a great number of customers have chosen Novell products, NetWare and, more recently, SUSE Linux, _because_ they have no direct relation to Microsoft or their products. This "deal" represents a very offensive slap in the face to them. As I indicated in the survey, there will be an impact on my purchasing decision as well as the recommendations I make to hundreds of clients. In the past I have strongly recommended Novell products based mainly on technical merits but now, because of the concerns I've mentioned, I'll certainly think twice before recommending Novell's Linux offerings. My email address is [address removed]; I await your answers or comments.
The FSF's reasoning seems to be that copyright law prohibits you from *modifying* a work without permission (regardless of whether you distribute it or not)
I certainly hope this isn't their reasoning, because it couldn't be more wrong. Copyright law does not prohibit any such thing; you can do as many re-writes of Moby Dick as you want. What the copyright laws prohibit is the copying and distribution of the original or any derivatives (i.e. your re-writes) unless you are the holder of the copyright to the original work.
1) tieing DLink to the act of trespass (there isn't a conspiracy to commit trespass)
Ah, but there is. D-Link is conspiring to have owners of their routers trespass into those NTP servers. I believe thay call this conspiracy "sales" or "marketing". I'm not sure if the owners themselves would have to have knowledge of this for it to be a conspiracy, but I don't beleive it would be.
2) proving they actually had access relative to the law.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Read the article: The routers are intentionally made to connect into a server where the stated policy of that server indicates that they are not welcome there. That seems like trespass to me.
3) there has to be a taking of data and I'm not sure the correct time qualifies.
I bet it might if the producer of that data has asked that it not be taken. See above. Also, what's being taken here is not just data; It's really a service: the availability of a very accurate source of time data. Anyone can give you the time, but this is something that has to be maintained at some expense so it has a definite value whether he's charging for it or not. Because of that, saying it was "given away for free" or "just the time" might not work as a defense if this went to court.
This always disheartens me a little, and my response is usually just "Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"
The obvious guess would be that Sony is paying for shelf space. It's a common arrangement in retail.
The other one is that they're using the shelf space and flashy display to get people to buy them because they aren't selling well.
That this is Mr. Quinn's way of thanking the open-source community for all of the hard work done on open-source software and open standards such as ODF. I'd hate to see how he treats the creators of software and standards he doesn't like....
I've just done a bunch of poking around on the web to find out more about CSFB and what I'm seeing is a LOT of references to Microsoft. Could there be some kind of connection here? I'm thinking that MS could be involved in an attack against Novell in the same way they were in an attack against IBM, i.e. whispering in somebody's ear to do so and providing some cash.
If you want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in one of three flavours ) then you'll get full support and a long, steady release cycle.
If you want a completely no-cost OS then you can use Red Hat Fedora.
He's not confusing the two and he isn't trolling. He's referring to the fact that there's no option in between the over-priced RHEL and Fedora.
Up until now, there's been three options with SuSE (I hate the new spelling too...) Linux: SuSE (now Novell) Linux Enterprise Server (and now Desktop as well) with full support and a long support cycle, SuSE Linux Professional (and previously Personal as well) with limited support but a much better package selection than the Enterprise version and still a good, stable OS, and the FTP version with limits to availability (FTP only) and package selection (no commercial packages, etc.) and no support.
Red Hat shot themselves in both feet when they dropped the regular boxed version of the OS. The community ended up with Fedora which produces a fast-moving target of a distribution with poor stability and no support (except for the usual community support). The only other version available was the over-priced RHEL version with full support but none of the other advantages that the boxed version had (good development environment, compatibility with the enterprise version, and some limited support). When they did this, Red Hat essentially pulled the rug out from under their own development community, most of whom moved on to Fedora and now (as far as I can see) couldn't care less about Red Hat except for having to deal with them as part of Fedora.
Unfortunately, Novell doesn't seem to have learned from Red Hat's lesson. The fact that they had the Pro version of SuSE Linux is what enabled them to get and keep a fairly vibrant developer community and with this bone-headed move, they're about to throw that away just as Red Hat did only Novell, trailing far behind Red Hat's #1 market position, isn't in a position to survive it as Red Hat was.
The problem seems to be that Novell are unable or unwilling to make a decision regarding KDE or Gnome.
So am I.
What I don't see is why this is a problem. In my mind, the problem is that they are trying to decide at all. I suspect that the real problem is that the Ximian folks are having too much input into Novell's Linux operations (if not all operations) in general. (It might explain some of the recent rash of Novell departures as well.)
There are good reasons for both KDE and Gnome as GUI options. KDE can be tweaked almost as well as Gnome can (though not quite as easily) and that functionality is getting better quickly. I've found that, once up and running, Gnome seems to be more CPU-hungry and more unstable than current KDE versions. I've found KDE to be a bit too flashy (i.e. too much eye-candy). My current preference is for KDE with a simpler window theme and most of the eye-candy shut off.
As far as applications go, Evolution and Firefox run just fine under KDE as long as the libraries they need are loaded. Also, please keep in mind that there are plenty of alternative browsers to Firefox and plenty of alternative mail clients / PIMs to Evolution (GroupWise, with it's Linux client, comes to mind here for some strange reason....)
Just think of it: With Mr. Lucas' habit of.. um.. tweaking and adjusting his creations, we'll never see the same episode twice, even with reruns. This might be the best thing to hit television ever.
Unfortunately the license has rather more serious implications particularly for things like embedded devices. Say you are an ISP and you use a particular router, which includes some GPL code, to support 250 customers. Since those customers are benefitting from a GPL-inclusive service, are all of those customers entitled to download the sourcecode?
They are right now, under GPL v2: The router's manufacturer has distributed GPL code (in the form of the router's firmware) so they are obligated to distribute the source code. Any users of the router should be able to download all the GPL code including modificatons from the router's manufacturer. The ISP has not distributed the software and is under no obligation to distribute the source code.
I think this is in fact the most likely interpretation.
I do too. I've been both a SuSE Linux and NetWare user for years and had a long chat with my Novell rep. about this just after the buyout was announced. This is exactly what he told me _wouldn't_ be happening after I expressed concerns to him about it.
I like KDE and want to stay with it so it sounds like it's time to hunt out a new Linux distro. (And before anyone chimes in, no, Mandrake is not an option.)
Get a clue yourself. RFC1738 lists it as a valid syntax. See section 3.1 if you don't believe me.
Other RFC's list this syntax as "NOT RECOMMENDED" as it exposes the account information in plaintext, a sentiment I agree with. On the other hand, I realize that sometimes it needs to be used or security isn't that much of an issue and it is part of the standard.
SCO's claim was that source code had been cut directly from "their" Unix code and added to Linux. This does not preclude someone from working on both projects. All this analyst's statements show is that the same people may have worked on both systems. This doesn't show a wholesale heist of intellectual property.
It doesn't even show that. All is means, if true, is that both SCO Unix (I'm assuming we're talking about UnixWare here not the bastardized-Xenix-pseudo-SysV SCO Unix, BTW) and Linux share common code. It says absolutely nothing about the source of that code. It's equally possible that the code was cut from Linux and pasted into Unix. It may have also been cut from a third source (BSD, AIX, etc.) and pasted into both Linux and Unix.
Let's not jump the gun here. A few common lines of code, comments or not, will not prove SCO's case. They will have to prove that the code was taken from their Unix in the first place and not from Linux. In order to make some kind of copyright claim (against anyone) they'll have to prove that the code held their copyright and wasn't code that AT&T lifted from BSD Unix. In their suit against IBM, they will probably also have to prove that it was done by someone under IBM's control or with their knowledge and agreement or that IBM somehow otherwise screwed up and let the code out into the wild, not by one of SCO's own programmers or some other third party.
Mind you, I'm not an intellectual property lawyer so I could be wrong but all this seems reasonable and obvious to me.
Why not? They did have support for it at one time.
When what was to become version 3 was in beta testing, they announced to the OS/2 community at large that they were looking for beta testers to test OS/2 as a hosted OS. A separate version of VMWare containing support and the utility programs for OS/2 was released as a test version. My understanding (I'll admit that I didn't try it myself) is that it was a little flaky but worked more than well enough to be useful.
Shortly before the release of the product, the OS/2 support was yanked and never released with little explanation of the reasoning. VMWare version 3 was released without OS/2 support and with a much higher price tag (at least for the individual hobbyist-type user). I can think of a few reasons the OS/2 support was yanked, though, even ignoring the usual conspiracy theories we OS/2 users are prone to. The major reason I can think of is that most OS/2 users at the time were looking for support of OS/2 as a host OS, not a hosted OS. More recently, Virtual PC has support for OS/2 both as host and hosted OS so it certainly is possible. It also costs less but has the disadvantage of not supporting Linux as a host OS.
Keith (if you're still following this thread) or anyone else who might know: Are these essentially the facts regarding OS/2 and VMWare? It was quite a while ago and I'm positive Idon't have all the facts about it, much less certain that all my "facts" are right...
I just saw an OS/2 prompt on a sales terminal at my local Sears store last weekend.
Re:Uhhhh, that's not in the EULA...
on
More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 1
For those who've used the Window Update feature to manually update, You get a fair amount of information on each update, and although they could sneak something by, I think someone out there would figure it out, and I don't think microsoft is blind to the fact that the public outcry would be substantial.
They may already be doing so. Just two days ago I ran Windows Update on a W2K system patched to SP2 and installed the critical updates package. One of the updates has to do with automatic upgrades. I elected to disable installation of that update but it was installed anyway.
Re:Here's some more information about the beastie.
on
Lowe's Servaline Genet
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· Score: 2, Informative
My understanding from reading the various press releases, etc., is that this will be a commonly developed Linux base to be used for server distributions.
How will this affect the four current desktop distributions offered by the four UL partners? Will anything developed as part of UL make it into the partners' desktop versions of Linux? If so, what? If not, why not?
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't these the same folks that MS already paid off once when they were Corel?
- Jeff
It is a pretty cute phrase. My only question is how did the judge know what that looked like?
I certainly hope this isn't their reasoning, because it couldn't be more wrong. Copyright law does not prohibit any such thing; you can do as many re-writes of Moby Dick as you want. What the copyright laws prohibit is the copying and distribution of the original or any derivatives (i.e. your re-writes) unless you are the holder of the copyright to the original work.
the problem with the trespass statute is:
1) tieing DLink to the act of trespass (there isn't a conspiracy to commit trespass)
Ah, but there is. D-Link is conspiring to have owners of their routers trespass into those NTP servers. I believe thay call this conspiracy "sales" or "marketing". I'm not sure if the owners themselves would have to have knowledge of this for it to be a conspiracy, but I don't beleive it would be.
2) proving they actually had access relative to the law.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Read the article: The routers are intentionally made to connect into a server where the stated policy of that server indicates that they are not welcome there. That seems like trespass to me.
3) there has to be a taking of data and I'm not sure the correct time qualifies.
I bet it might if the producer of that data has asked that it not be taken. See above. Also, what's being taken here is not just data; It's really a service: the availability of a very accurate source of time data. Anyone can give you the time, but this is something that has to be maintained at some expense so it has a definite value whether he's charging for it or not. Because of that, saying it was "given away for free" or "just the time" might not work as a defense if this went to court.
Huh. I thought those mushrooms on my pizza seemed a little odd.....
This always disheartens me a little, and my response is usually just "Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"
The obvious guess would be that Sony is paying for shelf space. It's a common arrangement in retail.
The other one is that they're using the shelf space and flashy display to get people to buy them because they aren't selling well.
That this is Mr. Quinn's way of thanking the open-source community for all of the hard work done on open-source software and open standards such as ODF. I'd hate to see how he treats the creators of software and standards he doesn't like....
I've just done a bunch of poking around on the web to find out more about CSFB and what I'm seeing is a LOT of references to Microsoft. Could there be some kind of connection here? I'm thinking that MS could be involved in an attack against Novell in the same way they were in an attack against IBM, i.e. whispering in somebody's ear to do so and providing some cash.
If you want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in one of three flavours ) then you'll get full support and a long, steady release cycle.
If you want a completely no-cost OS then you can use Red Hat Fedora.
He's not confusing the two and he isn't trolling. He's referring to the fact that there's no option in between the over-priced RHEL and Fedora.
Up until now, there's been three options with SuSE (I hate the new spelling too...) Linux: SuSE (now Novell) Linux Enterprise Server (and now Desktop as well) with full support and a long support cycle, SuSE Linux Professional (and previously Personal as well) with limited support but a much better package selection than the Enterprise version and still a good, stable OS, and the FTP version with limits to availability (FTP only) and package selection (no commercial packages, etc.) and no support.
Red Hat shot themselves in both feet when they dropped the regular boxed version of the OS. The community ended up with Fedora which produces a fast-moving target of a distribution with poor stability and no support (except for the usual community support). The only other version available was the over-priced RHEL version with full support but none of the other advantages that the boxed version had (good development environment, compatibility with the enterprise version, and some limited support). When they did this, Red Hat essentially pulled the rug out from under their own development community, most of whom moved on to Fedora and now (as far as I can see) couldn't care less about Red Hat except for having to deal with them as part of Fedora.
Unfortunately, Novell doesn't seem to have learned from Red Hat's lesson. The fact that they had the Pro version of SuSE Linux is what enabled them to get and keep a fairly vibrant developer community and with this bone-headed move, they're about to throw that away just as Red Hat did only Novell, trailing far behind Red Hat's #1 market position, isn't in a position to survive it as Red Hat was.
I'm a Novell partner selling Linux solutions.
The problem seems to be that Novell are unable or unwilling to make a decision regarding KDE or Gnome.
So am I.
What I don't see is why this is a problem. In my mind, the problem is that they are trying to decide at all. I suspect that the real problem is that the Ximian folks are having too much input into Novell's Linux operations (if not all operations) in general. (It might explain some of the recent rash of Novell departures as well.)
There are good reasons for both KDE and Gnome as GUI options. KDE can be tweaked almost as well as Gnome can (though not quite as easily) and that functionality is getting better quickly. I've found that, once up and running, Gnome seems to be more CPU-hungry and more unstable than current KDE versions. I've found KDE to be a bit too flashy (i.e. too much eye-candy). My current preference is for KDE with a simpler window theme and most of the eye-candy shut off.
As far as applications go, Evolution and Firefox run just fine under KDE as long as the libraries they need are loaded. Also, please keep in mind that there are plenty of alternative browsers to Firefox and plenty of alternative mail clients / PIMs to Evolution (GroupWise, with it's Linux client, comes to mind here for some strange reason....)
Just think of it: With Mr. Lucas' habit of .. um .. tweaking and adjusting his creations, we'll never see the same episode twice, even with reruns. This might be the best thing to hit television ever.
Unfortunately the license has rather more serious implications particularly for things like embedded devices. Say you are an ISP and you use a particular router, which includes some GPL code, to support 250 customers. Since those customers are benefitting from a GPL-inclusive service, are all of those customers entitled to download the sourcecode?
They are right now, under GPL v2: The router's manufacturer has distributed GPL code (in the form of the router's firmware) so they are obligated to distribute the source code. Any users of the router should be able to download all the GPL code including modificatons from the router's manufacturer. The ISP has not distributed the software and is under no obligation to distribute the source code.
Just curious. Why not Mandrake?
In my experience, it's too unstable compared to SuSE (or RedHat or Debian for that matter).
I think this is in fact the most likely interpretation.
I do too. I've been both a SuSE Linux and NetWare user for years and had a long chat with my Novell rep. about this just after the buyout was announced. This is exactly what he told me _wouldn't_ be happening after I expressed concerns to him about it.
I like KDE and want to stay with it so it sounds like it's time to hunt out a new Linux distro. (And before anyone chimes in, no, Mandrake is not an option.)
Other RFC's list this syntax as "NOT RECOMMENDED" as it exposes the account information in plaintext, a sentiment I agree with. On the other hand, I realize that sometimes it needs to be used or security isn't that much of an issue and it is part of the standard.
It doesn't even show that. All is means, if true, is that both SCO Unix (I'm assuming we're talking about UnixWare here not the bastardized-Xenix-pseudo-SysV SCO Unix, BTW) and Linux share common code. It says absolutely nothing about the source of that code. It's equally possible that the code was cut from Linux and pasted into Unix. It may have also been cut from a third source (BSD, AIX, etc.) and pasted into both Linux and Unix.
Let's not jump the gun here. A few common lines of code, comments or not, will not prove SCO's case. They will have to prove that the code was taken from their Unix in the first place and not from Linux. In order to make some kind of copyright claim (against anyone) they'll have to prove that the code held their copyright and wasn't code that AT&T lifted from BSD Unix. In their suit against IBM, they will probably also have to prove that it was done by someone under IBM's control or with their knowledge and agreement or that IBM somehow otherwise screwed up and let the code out into the wild, not by one of SCO's own programmers or some other third party.
Mind you, I'm not an intellectual property lawyer so I could be wrong but all this seems reasonable and obvious to me.
Why not? They did have support for it at one time.
When what was to become version 3 was in beta testing, they announced to the OS/2 community at large that they were looking for beta testers to test OS/2 as a hosted OS. A separate version of VMWare containing support and the utility programs for OS/2 was released as a test version. My understanding (I'll admit that I didn't try it myself) is that it was a little flaky but worked more than well enough to be useful.
Shortly before the release of the product, the OS/2 support was yanked and never released with little explanation of the reasoning. VMWare version 3 was released without OS/2 support and with a much higher price tag (at least for the individual hobbyist-type user). I can think of a few reasons the OS/2 support was yanked, though, even ignoring the usual conspiracy theories we OS/2 users are prone to. The major reason I can think of is that most OS/2 users at the time were looking for support of OS/2 as a host OS, not a hosted OS. More recently, Virtual PC has support for OS/2 both as host and hosted OS so it certainly is possible. It also costs less but has the disadvantage of not supporting Linux as a host OS.
Keith (if you're still following this thread) or anyone else who might know: Are these essentially the facts regarding OS/2 and VMWare? It was quite a while ago and I'm positive Idon't have all the facts about it, much less certain that all my "facts" are right...
I just saw an OS/2 prompt on a sales terminal at my local Sears store last weekend.
For those who've used the Window Update feature to manually update, You get a fair amount of information on each update, and although they could sneak something by, I think someone out there would figure it out, and I don't think microsoft is blind to the fact that the public outcry would be substantial.
They may already be doing so. Just two days ago I ran Windows Update on a W2K system patched to SP2 and installed the critical updates package. One of the updates has to do with automatic upgrades. I elected to disable installation of that update but it was installed anyway.
Oops! Here's the link
My understanding from reading the various press releases, etc., is that this will be a commonly developed Linux base to be used for server distributions.
How will this affect the four current desktop distributions offered by the four UL partners? Will anything developed as part of UL make it into the partners' desktop versions of Linux? If so, what? If not, why not?
Depends.
I just checked the .gz tarball. The lines from the patch are not in the file.