Novell Goes Public with Microsoft Linux Deal 133
InfoWorldMike writes "On the back of defending the agreement this week, Novell did as promised and published details of its landmark November 2006 Linux partnership agreements with Microsoft. Linux advocates are expected to scour the documents for signs of how the agreement may affect Linux and whether anything in it will put Microsoft or Novell in potential violation of the upcoming version 3 of the GNU General Public license (GPL). The GPL is used in licensing many components of the Linux operating system. Open-source advocate Bruce Perens said he would be looking to see exactly what Novell was given through the deal and whether there is any requirement for the Linux vendor to defend Microsoft's patent claims. 'What I'm actually looking for is, to what extent was there a violation of faith?' he said."
The damage is done. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The damage is done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Richard has been prophetic about this: his concerns at the Novell/Microsoft deal, and about software patents in general, were exposed as completely correct when Microsoft started its recent claims of hundreds of patent violations without naming a single patent.
Re:The damage is done. (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless, of course, what he does is to split the OSS community.
You rightly called this deal FUD. It will go away with time. RMS won't, so it would be far better for us all if we could keep him just to THIS side of insanely divisive, and this deal isn't going to help that any.
No protection what-so-ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Actual Patent Agreement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Actual Patent Agreement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The damage is done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft product names listed in the agreement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The damage is done. (Score:2, Insightful)
You guys are nuts. I ask you, what evil has RMS done to the Free Software community?! Starting it in the first place? Seeing into the future of the software industry and writing the GPL to protect the community (1991) or doing it again in 2006-07? Ever ask yourself *why* he does what he does? I'll give you a hint. It's to keep Free Software Free.
parent: "Unless, of course, what he does is to split the OSS community"
RMS didn't split the OSS community, the "open-sourcers" split the Free Software community. So if you've got separation anxiety, blame Torvalds, Perens, and that whacko Raymond who may write good software, but don't have the desire or the ability to protect it. Name one OSI license that will help protect Free or "open-source" software as well as the GPL against the enemies of Free Software.
If it weren't for RMS, Moglen, the FSF, and now the Software Freedom Law Center, all you "open-source" folks would be working for Microsoft or some other proprietary software developer.
Open Source is dead, because it doesn't mean anything. Even Microsoft can make open source software.
No acknolwedgement of Infringement (Score:5, Insightful)
3.4 No Acknowledgement of Infringement. Nothing in this Agreement shall imply, or be construed as an admission or acknowledgement by a Party, that any Patents of the other Party are infringed, valid or enforceable.
Which will hopefully finally put an end to all the nonsense conspiracy theories [boycottnovell.com] that "Novell admitted that Linux infringes patents" etc., even though Novell have constantly re-iterated [novell.com] that such a claim was ridiculous. As I've said several times before, blaming Novell for Microsoft's recent claims is just completely unfounded, and in fact there's nothing new or particularly recent about it; Microsoft have always been flooding the market with falsities about Linux's infringement on their patents.
Hopefully the published results will provide the community with a general better understanding [opensuse.org] of the deal, so that at least if they disagree/hate it, they do it for real reasons (which seems to be rare).
This is a course in business ethics (Score:3, Insightful)
In the new dawn emerging from the FOSS revolution we are finally getting what we really need to move technology forward: light. These back room deals for contingent permission to use intangible ideas and leverage market share will not stand the light of day. All deals are eventually exposed. This leads to some business ethics lessons that should have been the standard all along:
Now let us set out to innovate good products and sell them on their merits, m'k?
Re:No right to distribute (Score:2, Insightful)
Bully for you! You manage to lead a pure and Justified existence, unsullied by any contamination of anything from Microsoft.
Unfortunately, if you hadn't noted from your Edenic paradise of FLOSS perfection, a large of PCs (whether work or home, Server or Desktop) run Windows.
This begs a question - how to encourage people and companies to migrate from Windows to GNU/Linux? This just doesn't mean providing desktop environments (Gnome/KDE) but also a way to migrate applications (a big concern for business).
Java is not a problem, but the Microsoft languages (C#.NET and VB.NET) are.
I know what! What is required is someone to help provide an environment where these applications can run in (say) Linux and not just Windows! That way, the path to paradise is not blocked for all those people and companies using stuff developed with Microsoft technologies. Is there such a person? Is there such a Project? Why, goodness me, there is; Mono, with Miguel as main developer.
Of course, you may not want Gnu/Linux to become mainstream. If so, may I humbly disagree.
(Oh, and a query, How will you avoid all the stuff that the Suse folk put into the kernel? They're still at it as well, by the way, looking at the latest change logs. Maybe you should use Hurd instead. I've heard it's very pure and unsullied!)
Sesostris III
(PS, I currently dual boot with Ubuntu, having always used KDE before, and I must admit I like it. As mentioned by someone else, there is Kubuntu if you prefer KDE. Xubuntu if you prefer neither!)
Re:The damage is done. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the goal is the best software, then the GPL is largely irrelevant. If the goal is the best open source (or Free) software, then the need for something like the GPL ultimately depends on whether or not the open source development model is more effective than the closed model. If it is, there isn't much of a need for preventing proprietary additions, because any temporary advantage from closed development will be negated over time, by parallel open development. If closed source is actually a more efficient development model, then something like the GPL becomes much more important. I don't know which is the case.
I'm not ideological, so I'm glad to be able to benefit from the incorporation of BSD sockets into proprietary software. If Windows 3.x/9x, SunOS, Mac OS and others hadn't been able to take advantage of BSD sockets code, it almost certainly would have prevented BSD sockets becoming a de facto standard. I don't know which networking API most of us would be using, but my guess would be something designed by Microsoft. Thanks to BSD sockets, all of these systems can interoperate well, and open source systems like Linux are actually useful as network servers, serving mostly Windows and Mac OS clients.
Re:The damage is done. (Score:4, Insightful)
For example: No matter what program I run, I'd like the "Open file" dialog to look the same. No matter what I'm trying to print, I'd like the "Print" dialog to be the same. When I'm trying to find out why my video doesn't play, it'd be great to have one video backend. It finally looks like everything is starting to standardize on ALSA for sound. Linux is the epitome of "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!". It's getting better, but still could use a lot of work.
Re:Actual Patent Agreement (Score:3, Insightful)
Novell gains revenue with the support contract OEM from Microsoft, Microsoft retains customer loyalty (and a cut of the support contract) and is able to sell "total solutions". Microsoft sees future revenue in customer support.
The patent stuff is more of a red herring in this deal. It is basically there to ease the deal. The main idea is that Microsoft gets to sell more stuff to customers and Novell gets more revenue. It is a win/win deal for both of them.
Re:This is a course in business ethics (Score:3, Insightful)
No; what we've really been getting is cultic bullying and intimidation, and the sorts of methods of social reform customarily employed by the Amish.
Microsoft on the one hand make legally questionable back room deals. On the other, Perens gets on a soap box and threatens Novell with the dire things that will happen to them if they don't get back with the Stallmanite program. We also see rank and file Linux users engaging in their usual, continual gutter tactics of slandering and threatening anyone in the IT trade press who prints anything contrary to the opinions they want universally held.
The beloved "community" has NO moral superiority whatsoever. The approach might be different in some respects, but the goal is more or less the same; control over how people think, and the software they use. In fact, the single reason why I've always believed that the FSF/its' cheerleading squad are actually considerably morally worse than Microsoft is because of the degree of dishonesty inherent in their claim to have more morally desirable intentions. Stallman is an aspiring cult leader, the same as Hubbard or any of the rest of them who have existed throughout history. There's nothing elevated or enlightened about it at all.
Re:The damage is done. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. The problem with him dealing with people directly is that he's never had any real ability himself to hide what he is. The tremendous value inherent in the mouthpiece strategy is that said mouthpieces can be people who know how to sound infinitely more diplomatic, sane, and reasonable than Stallman himself, so he gets more supporters, (who because they don't know better, foolishly assume that Stallman himself is as sane as his representatives sound) and his genuine megalomania also stays safely hidden away from people who would otherwise have serious ethical problems with following him if they knew about it.
Stallman needs to communicate with people via third parties for exactly the same reason that Darth Vader ended up needing to wear the black suit; the outer appearance needs to be made at least vaguely palatable, because the genuine, internal reality is in fact truly monstrous.
Re:The damage is done. (Score:2, Insightful)
This might be true, but the effectiveness of Stallman's fearmongering, coupled with the perception that Microsoft's recent behaviour reinforces it, and aided as always by the aggressive suppression of dissent engaged in by Stallman's followers, means that currently anyway, the cultic half of the abovementioned alliance is predominating.
We can hope that the pendulum eventually swings back, and things resume some vague semblance of genuine balance, however the prognosis for this is currently not good. As far as the open source side of the equation is concerned, Eric Raymond seems to have largely fallen out of sight, and the zealots are also apparently gradually succeeding at pulling Linus into line; at least to the point where he no longer is willing to express definitive resistance to their goals. Even if he still doesn't agree with the FSF internally, he will thus become controllable.
Re:Pay the Danegeld, never be rid of the Dane (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenSuSE may mean that Novell is already facing a quiet insurrection. It also may not. (I'm not a SUSE user, so I haven't been following them. But even if it doesn't mean that now, it could change to mean that at any time.)
Guido may have the title "Benevolent Dictator For Life", but if enough people got unhappy with his decisions, a new language would fork off of Python. (It doesn't even require that someone be unhappy. Greg Ewing could decide to develop Pyrex into a full language rather than leaving it to be an intermediate between Python and C, and that would do it in and of itself.)
So there are lots of "Petty tyrants", both benevolent and otherwise. In the FOSS community their power over each person is generally quite limited.
Re:The damage is done. (Score:1, Insightful)
Do us a favour; come up with something new. For one thing, the shill argument is getting extremely old, and for another, the people who use it would be lucky if 1% of the time that it had been used, it had actually been accurate. It's a term Linux people use dismissively for anybody who says anything that they don't want to hear. Dissent from the groupthink? You're a shill.
Expressing critical or dissenting opinions about Richard Stallman is not a groundless activity, and I can assure you that it is not one which you or any of member of his cult will ever dissuade me from engaging in. If you want me or the rest of us to stop, here's how you can make it happen. Create a scenario where the FSF literally ceases to exist, and where Richard Stallman is dissuaded from engaging in any form of public work or appearance ever again. This scenario is what I want, and I'm not going to stop praying for it to happen or from creating any kind of opposition to him or his followers that I possibly can. I'm also going to offer any support I can to others on this site who engage in this activity. Richard Stallman is the proverbial scorpion on Linux's back. His formal organisation and the informal collective of his followers together are a scourge, and I honestly cannot adequately verbalise the extent of the loathing which I feel towards them.
I'm not merely a shill. From your perspective, I'm something considerably worse.
Re:Conspiracy Theory? (Score:4, Insightful)