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.

Dammit.

[cromar (1103585)]

Double dammit.

Re:Dammit.

[h4rm0ny (722443)]

Frustration is understandable, but targeted disgust can be more therapeutic. Instead of "dammit" try saying "treacherous judases who have just signed their own death warrant and thank fuck they're just a pissant little distro that nobody really gave a shit and whose only notable achievement is this sudden managing to replace the Linux world's apathy toward them in one stroke, albeit with dislike."

Yep, saying that is much more therapeutic. Especially at the top of a thread on an international tech news forum. ;)

"Traitors - we piss on you!"

Re:

[h4rm0ny (722443)]

Keep it. I have several.

Technology benefits?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Could it be? Could Turbolinux users be getting transparent title bars on their windows? That would be FANTASTIC!

huh?

[Lord Ender (156273)]

Microsoft pledged not to sue Turbolinux's users

Turbolinux has users?

Re:

[davidsyes (765062)]

They should be made to run around in fundoshi for 3 weeks, apologize, and bathe in squid oil for 2 weeks. I don't suppose other parts of Asia will welcome this threat to a unified Asian Linux distro. This is just (obscene) (Why the hell cannot )

Re:

[TheGratefulNet (143330)]

Turbolinux has users?

its not as quick off the line as SuperLinux and you do have to keep your CPU running a few extra minutes after you're done computing for the day (they make timers to help with that).

check your drives every 12,000 I/O's and it should run fine for years.

Re:

[betterunixthanunix (980855)]

I get the feeling that I am not the only one who has noticed that, after Novell, Microsoft hasn't really been able to sign a deal with a major player in the Linux world. Actually, every time I hear a Microsoft deal, I jump back in shock, shock that the other company in the deal still exists. Linspire? Xandros? Turbolinux? These are names that I know, but hadn't heard much about for a long time. I guess it's not a good sign on Microsoft's part that only forgotten companies are willing to sign the pact.

Follow the money?

[khasim (1285)]

I don't see anything in the article about Microsoft paying to "share" their "technology".

But I'm sure that is what happened.

Anyone have any other references? It appears that Microsoft is buying up the lesser Linux distributions.

Re:

[awrowe (1110817)]

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

Re:

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

I run openSUSE, both at work and at home, but my secondary home machine is going to be running Fedora Core as of next week.

Its not that I have a problem with Novell (I don't - I think they were blindsided by Microsoft's post-deal lies about the "patent protection racket"), but at the same time, I can "vote with my cpus" for a healthy linux ecosystem.

Re:huh?

[muyuubyou (621373)]

They have some, mostly in Japan. I've bought Turbolinux in the past, but I swear I never will after this move.

Re:huh?

[pluther (647209)]

Turbolinux has users?

had

Re:

[Rogerborg (306625)]

And the good news for them is, they'll be among the last to be sued by Microsoft.

Protection or mutual technology sharing?

[starseeker (141897)]

The article refers to a cross-licensing agreement with intent to use some technology - it doesn't say anything about not suing customers, although presumably that could be part of the deal and not mentioned here.

Money ?

[DrYak (748999)]

Yeah but did they get money out of the deal ? Back then, Novell got Microsoft to invest some money in the development of cross-compatibility software (in short : Novell payed some cash to MS for patents, and MS in return gave huge wads of cash to Novell for development)

Is this the case tody with TurboLinux ?

Re:Money ?

[jbengt (874751)]

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.

The good old days

[Dice (109560)]

And here I was thinking that Turbolinux died years ago. Last time I remember hearing about them is back in '99 or '00.

Maybe they just died on the inside.

Re:

[slack_prad (942084)]

Looks like they went underground [distrowatch.com] in 2002 (offering no free ISO download). Now they've resurfaced.
The Turbolinux 10 Desktop now costs 29$ [turbolinux.com]

Re:

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

From the distrowatch link parent cites ... "Turbolinux 7 Server also supports the Large File Support (LFS) standard for working with applications that manage or handle up to four terabytes of data "

All the modern distros can have maximum file sizes larger than that ... old chart ... [novell.com]. And then you have these totally insane file size limits [wikipedia.org] ... Petabyte and exabite file sizes ....

Turbo linux? They lost their cachet around the time that PC makers stopped putting turbo buttons on computers.

Queen

[businessnerd (1009815)]

There's a Queen song that comes to mind...

Re:

[Kalriath (849904)]

Allow me to ruin the suspense, everyone:

Another One Bites the Dust.

Re:

[MightyMartian (840721)]

I was thinking more "Death On Two Legs".

Re:

[h4rm0ny (722443)]

Under Pressure?

Or maybe from the Microsoft side: "I want it all"

Re:Queen

[DrSkwid (118965)]

Which one ?

• You Don't Fool Me
• Stone Cold Crazy
• The Show Must Go On
• I'm Going Slightly Mad
• Scandal
• I Can't Live With You
• Headlong
• Too Much Love Will Kill You
• These Are The Days Of Our Lives
• No One But You
• I Want It All
• Pain Is So Close To Pleasure
• Who Wants To Live Forever
• Man On The Prowl
• I Want To Break Free
  
• Under Pressure
• Save Me
• Don't Stop Me Now
• Jealousy
• Liar

that'll do :)

Blasphemy

[Bill, Shooter of Bul (629286)]

I can't believe Bohemian Rhapsody didn't make your list.

Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me,for me,for me

Re:

[Dogtanian (588974)]

There's a Queen song that comes to mind...

You mean that Microsoft is thinking "I Want It All" or singing "You're My Best Friend" (when they're really just after TurboLinux's sweets?). "Under Pressure"? "Fight from the Inside"? This could go on forever.

It sure as hell can't have been "Good Company" though.

Re:

[steveoc (2661)]

Ill have a crack at this too .. another more obscure Queen song

Keep Passing the Open Windows

Yeah Baby, thats gotta be the one !!

http://www.pemcom.demon.co.uk/queen/works/windows.html [demon.co.uk]

My list keeps growing

[Araxen (561411)]

On Linux distro's that I'll never install or support.

Re:

[Chapter80 (926879)]

My list keeps growing... On Linux distro's that I'll never install or support.

You're looking at this all wrong! Download TurboLinux. Install it at all your customers (on some old 486 machine in the storage closet). Then tell them that they may violate any Microsoft patents that they want.

"Microsoft pledged not to sue Turbolinux's users for patent infringement."

(I should mention that I ANAL thing...)

Re:

[Tarlus (1000874)]

Why?

who??

[dartmongrel (855947)]

yup, yet another insignificant distro took some bucks to be the latest FUD. Well done M$FT, I'm so scared that I'm formatting my drive right now to reinstall XP. /sarcasm Wake me up if a real distro like Red Hat Debian or Slackware SELL OUT, at which point I will simply start using OpenBSD on my desktop in addition to my server. This is FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD!

Re:

[stinerman (812158)]

Debian won't ever go under, no matter if it becomes illegal to run a Linux distro. They'd just pull all their US servers, and I'd change a few lines in sources.lst. Problem solved. I assume Slackware would do something similar.

Red Hat might have problems if Ballmer makes good on his threats as they are based in the US.

And if worse comes to worse, then you always have a *BSD as you noted. There is really nothing to worry about as far as home users are concerned.

Re:who??

[Tarlus (1000874)]

...a real distro like Red Hat Debian...

God, I hope that never happens.

Re:

[h4rm0ny (722443)]

It is. Though happily I work in an environment where I was able to get our SuSE installation replaced with Debian. And I did that in response to their Microsoft deal. It's a small thing, but I did it and I liked that I did it.

Re:

[sconeu (64226)]

Which leaves Mandriva as the only UnitedLinux member who won't.

• SuSE => Novell. Signed.
• Caldera... Well, technically they haven't joined the covenant, but we all know what their turned out to be
• TurboLinux. Signed
• Connectiva. Merged with Mandrake to form Mandriva. Won't sign.

Tiny Trend

[markdavis (642305)]

So, other than Novell, many of the "tiny" Linuxes (those with the least user base), seem interested in trying to attach their wagons to the Microsoft train.

I, for one, am not all THAT surprised, but neither all that concerned, either. The message from the other LARGER Linux distros like Redhat, Canonical, and Mandriva, have all have a clear message: ***NO*** If one of those were to fall for it, I would be VERY concerned.

Show us the infringing patents, Microsoft.... we are still waiting...

Is this really bad

[prelelat (201821)]

Don't companies all of the time say hey I won't sue you if you don't sue me? If Microsoft has so much on Linux as far as software patents go then I would think they would sue instead signing non aggression agreements. I think Microsoft might have some things that Linux could say they hold a patent on. Maybe this is a good thing for Linux as they don't have to worry about going to court for 10 years with their clients and developers wondering what will happen if Microsoft gets the upper hand. Even if it was something developers could change easily it's nice to know you won't be going to court because something is similar enough to a patent Microsoft owns. I can see why they would go and do this, though I do think it's almost like signing a deal with the devil. I hope distros like Red Hat and such don't do it personally.

I don't know much about it so if I'm wrong could you please explain to me how this is bad?

Don Ballmer Strikes again

[MrSteveSD (801820)]

[Capo di tutti capi, Steve Ballmer] - "That's a nice set of users ya got there. Shame if anything were to happen to 'em. I'm a reasonable Mafia don though, I just want to 'Wet my beak' as they say."

Trying to gain more visiblity?

[turnipsatemybaby (648996)]

It seems to me that, with the exception of Novell, the distros signing up for this thing are all small-time distros with relatively small user bases.

I can't grok what Novell could possibly have been thinking, but it would make sense for the less popular distros to align with microsoft as they instantly become newsworthy and generate more interest.

Has there *ever* been a slashdot story on TurboLinux prior to this? If there was it certainly wasn't recently.

Re:

[Tetsujin (103070)]

Has there *ever* been a slashdot story on TurboLinux prior to this? If there was it certainly wasn't recently.

Rejoice! I have the answer you seek!
http://linux.slashdot.org/search.pl?query=turbolinux [slashdot.org]

Re:

[mc moss (1163007)]

Ok, I'm a complete noob when it comes to Linux and open sourse. How can microsoft sue people who are using open source software? I thought the whole point is that the community works on it together or something to continually make it better and distribute for free among themselves.

Is MS's threats liable or slander?

[newgalactic (840363)]

Is MS's threats liable or slander? It seems that they always throw around that "we'll protect our Intellectual Property..." line a lot, but no one seems to have a clue what their talking about. As far as I know, making unsubstantiated claims like that for the purpose of scaring corporations away from Linux is illegal (called liable or slander I think). It's akin to "Brand X" claiming "Brand Y kills a puppy every time you use their product", when they don't. Can someone shed some light on this issue? Do

Re:

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

"It seems that they always throw around that "we'll protect our Intellectual Property..." line a lot, but no one seems to have a clue what their talking about. "

They are "protecting their intellectual property". Their intellectual property consists of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Ask anyone who's using Windows and is afraid of the forced downgrade to Vista on their next purchase ...

Oh, you meant like in software? Nothing to see there ...

Pat

[turgid (580780)]

When Pat sells out, the fat lady will be singing. Not before.

Until then, get busy living.

Microsoft won't sue them but ....

[HermMunster (972336)]

Microsoft has created shill company that collects patents and sues. So, even though Microsoft hasn't sued Novell it's shill company did. How's that for a pact?

Repeat quickly

[SpaghettiPattern (609814)]

Repeat quickly MS Turbolinux, MS Turbolinux, MS Turbolinux, MS Turbolinux...

Well okay, it's funnier in Spanish or Italian.

Re:

[domatic (1128127)]

These Linux companies are making money from many upstream projects. They get to make the money while the upstreams are thrown under the Microsoft Legal bus.

Re:Turbolinux?

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

... 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:

[adolf (21054)]

Sliding into obscurity?

In order for that to happen, the item must first have been something other than obscure.

The last time I heard mention of Turbolinux, every distribution was obscure (and most of them still are). That Turbolinux continues to remain obscure while others have become somewhat more common does not mean that it's sliding anywhere, but is instead only an indication that it turned stagnant a long time go.