Microsoft Gets Novell Docs Before OSS Community

flydpnkrtn sends in an InformationWeek article arising out of Novell's SEC filing yesterday, asking: "Is this just more Novell-bashing material? Or is this no big deal? And of course this type of thing runs contrary to the 'spirit of the GPL'..." "Under its controversial alliance with Novell, Microsoft is entitled to receive key technical documentation from the Linux distributor even if that documentation is not generally available to open source software developers, according to a Novell document."

Don't Think This is Relevant

[segedunum]

I don't think this is quite as it looks. The documentation this refers to is probably for Novells proprietary products, such as Zenworks, their virtualisation management stuff etc. That's really what Microsoft is most interested in Novell giving them a leg up on - whereupon Microsoft will spit Novell out and start eating even more of their customers.

It won't affect the open source community one jot, but it's just further evidence as to how tight a grip Microsoft (Novell's number one competitor who wants to put them out of business remember) has on Novell's very small and inconsequential nads. Novell never ceases to amaze me with their incompetence unfortunately, and if they want to flush themselves down the toilet then that's entirely up to them.

that's quite common

[nanosquid]

It's quite common for people developing FOSS to share documentation and code non-publicly before a public release. There is nothing wrong with that, and it's an important part of FOSS. If the software falls under the (L)GPL, the recipient can, of course, redistribute it, but can choose not to. Under Apache or BSD, the developer can impose additional restrictions and prevent the recipient from redistributing the code.

Re:Don't Think This is Relevant

[Stewie241]

if Novell took a GPLed software and wrote documentation for it, should the documentation be under the GPL?

Well, I don't think all the books that have been written about Linux are GPL, are they? It is still illegal to redistribute these... I would consider these books to be documentation.

Ian

Re:I don't see any problem with this.

[TheRaven64]

The problem here IS that Microsoft appears to be collaborating with Novel

Since the quote directly mentioned virtualisation, I would imagine that this related to the work Novell are doing to create a compatibility layer between the Vista hypervisor and Xen, allowing guests from one to run on the other.