Groklaw Guts the Novell/Microsoft Deal

walterbyrd writes "Pamala Jones, at groklaw, totally rips apart the Novell/Deal patent protection deal. From the article: 'Justin Steinman reveals that to market their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server against Red Hat they ask, "Do you want the Linux that works with Windows? Or the one that doesn't?" It's just appalling. Let me ask you developers who are kernel guys a question: When you contributed code to the kernel, was it your intent that it be used against Red Hat? How about the rest of you developers? Is that all right with you, that your code is being marketed by Novell like that? I also have questions about antitrust issues, with Microsoft being Novell's partner in such deals and sales pitches. Nothing speaks louder about Microsoft's true determination never to be actually interoperable than this conference.'"

Re:Self-serving

[morgan_greywolf]

Well its rather self-serving that an IBM employee would rip apart the Novell/Microsoft deal. Now if an uninterested and unbiased third party had something to say about the deal that would be insightful.

Pamela Jones? An IBM employee? PJ has stated, oh, I don't know, like a few dozen times that she most certainly does not work for IBM and never has. She's a paralegal who works for a law firm. Which one, I don't know, but I'm betting it's not Swain and Cravath, LLC., IBM's legal representation. Especially since she has to get the court filings off of the public legal databases like everyone else and she relies on readers living in Utah to report on court hearings.

But never mind that. Thing is that IBM has a standing relationship with Novell to sell and market SuSE. They also happen to have a similar relationship with Red Hat. But IBM tends to push SuSE more for high-end enterprise stuff than they do Red Hat. I think it boils down to YaST vs. Anaconda/Kickstart. Whatever.

Re:Marketing and producing

[muffel]

The openSUSE project now releases free SUSE downloads - something SUSE had been against

Huh? SuSE has (had) always been free to download via ftp.suse.com.

Re:Self-serving

[init100]

Now if an uninterested ... third party had something to say about the deal that would be insightful.

Why would any uninterested party say anything about anything?

Re:Competition is good

[c]

> This is the first Groklaw article I've read and if this hyperbole is typical of its offerings
> I'm amazed so many people listen to it.

As with slashdot, you gotta pick and choose.

Groklaw's articles following the SCO lawsuits are second to none. Okay, the lawyers and judges involved might have better seats, but otherwise you want to go with Groklaw. A bit of bias, sure, the odd bit of self-referential hyperbole, but generally things are well done.

Groklaw's coverage of more general "community" issues... I really don't have anything good to say about how it's done. I pretty much ignore it (sometimes it links to better stuff), and suggest you do the same.

c.

Re:Competition is good

[non]

have a look at this user's first comment on this story here [slashdot.org]

Re:Marketing and producing

[WhiteWolf666]

It used to only be 6 months after the release of the commercial distro. This changed with 10.0, IIRC.

Re:Ever had a real job? No?

[Spudds]

Let's see you tell upper management that they need to pay to retrain the entire user base so that they can use *your* desktop operating system of choice rather than the desktop OS that both the company and everyone else in their business space has been using successfully for over a decade

Done. I work for a phone company in Springfield, MA. They've been using Windows on their desktop for quite a while now, mostly due to both my predecessors being totally incompetent and windows being the status-quo.

It took very little convincing on my part to get the management to see the benefits of Ubuntu on the normal users desktops and we'll be doing a nearly-full rollout (some manager computers will remain windows) in a couple months.

The 'retraining' argument is mostly FUD as most computer users are familar enough with the desktop (any desktop) to use a "start" or "applications" menu. There's practically no difference from a user stand point between IE and Firefox and Word (pre-tabbed interface) is close enough to OpenOffice to not make much difference. Oh, and did I mention it makes my job and the manager's jobs easier by leaps and bounds due to the enormous configurability of linux? I can put exactly what the users need in the menus and lock down the machines so they can do only what they're supposed to do for their jobs.

Sounds like someone is still in school and has never had a real job. Trust me, kid, when you get out into the real world your thinking is going to get much more realistic.

Huh. Condescending and incorrect at the same time! Just because you don't have the sack to anti-up and try to improve the technological world around us, doesn't mean you should FUD-storm those of us with the will and determination to try.

Looks like you're the one that needs to 'grow up'.

Re:Shock! Horror!

[sumdumass]

Free software doesn't enter into it. They are free to do as they please within the terms of the licence. However, they might nevertheless be wise not to aggravate the community of developers who produce so much of the code they sell. And if they do deliberately set out to subvert the clear intent of those developers as reflected in their choice of licence, well they needn't act all baffled when people get angry with them.

Bewildered might eb a better word then baffled. If those programmers don't want their code being used in a certain way, then they shouldn't use a license that allows that way. It is quite simple really, if they are upset because a license allows certain actions, they they should use a different one.

They had plenty until they decided to do an end run around the terms of the GPL. They might have plenty again if they stop. In the meantime, it's not their code to do with as they please, and until they understand that, they may find respect a little harder to come by.

Please elaborate on this end run around the GPL. It isn't like they have actually done anything that doesn't exist in someone's mind. So if they have and I'm not aware of it, let me know. Also some links would be nice but I can google too. I don't think there is anything outside the deal in the first place though. And Novell explained that away right from the start. Anything outside that context is nothing but someone's over active imagination.

See, a lot of the people getting upset are the people who wrote the code. I think they're entitled to an opinion on the subject, and I don't really think you can dismiss them as zealots. I don't understand why they would be upset? They wrote the code and used a license that allowed this. Unless it is a problem where not as many people as we are led to believe are upset and all this FUD from zealots is lillte more then a campaign to get them upset. So far everything I have heard accused is the result of someone's imagination.

Like Jeremy Allison said - if we found a loophole that let us sell MS office legally, do you suppose Microsoft would be happy? Or slow to close it? Why then do Novell suppose free software developers would feel any differently?

I'm not sure Jerome Allison is a good source to be quoting on this. He has made a very stupid move in using the GPLv3 for a project that works with MS software. Not only are they directly liable now for any patents they might have been brought into the GPLv3 versions of Samba, they have opened themselves up to the possibility of MS changing their product licenses in a way that makes everyone a mini-novell which of course means the GPLv3 would stop them from distributing code licensed under the GPLv3. But Samba needs the MS software to test against so they will/could end up in a situation where they have to pack pedal, ignore the GPLv3 license or even wilt away into non-existence.

As for selling code, nothing in the GPL stops anyone from doing so. There are lots of people doing this right now. They presented the code as GPLed which would allow this to happen so why should anyone be outraged once it happens? And no, this isn't directly comparable to MS office Code. The two couldn't contrast differently. One is marketed in a closed way making you expect to have to pay for it. The other is marketed behind buzzwords like free and open source. It actively makes the claims that you can take it and make money from it, it actively makes claims that you can change it and use it outside the original context.

I don't think I need to explain which is which but I will says that you should represent something one way and then complain when it get used that way. If you don't like it, use a different license. And if you want to impload by shooting yourself i the foot during the process, fine. just don't complain when others aren't committing suicide alongside you and don't complain when they laugh at you later.

"Windows just works" only if locked down...

[Cato]

Let's see about this "Windows just works" thing - yes, Windows apps are generally quite stable these days, and the system rarely bluescreens. However, on my 1 GB laptop with XP, running quite a few browser/office apps but nothing unusual, and fully patched as a corporate laptop, I have had the following issues

- have to forcibly reset the system every few weeks when it completely locks up - most recently this morning when I tried to do a standby and the whole system locked up

- install a new ATI driver to solve a bluescreen a few weeks ago - seems OK now, but I've never had a video driver crash on Linux

- on Saturday, found that every time I tried to run Windows Explorer, it crashed, taking down the main Explorer task bar - so I couldn't even browse filesystem to see what is wrong! Luckily I could work around this to discover that a particular copy protection DLL, which put itself in the temp directory, had been deleted by temp file cleanup, causing the crash. But why doesn't Explorer lock such DLLs? Of course, the copy protection DLL wouldn't be needed with open source apps, so this is something of an app bug.

- every few days I have to restart because Windows says 'insufficient memory to complete operation' - this is on a 1 GB box with a huge pagefile, and I'm only using 1.5-2 GB total! What on earth happened to virtual memory???

Meanwhile on my Ubuntu box, the admin is really zero now I'm using Feisty - my HP printer was discovered on the network by the HPLIP setup tool, and just worked. The only lockup I had was when Google's Picasa went mad and used 100% CPU, and even then I could kill it from an SSH login, so I didn't even need to restart X.

The point is that Windows does work, but it takes a huge amount of effort to keep it working, unless you have a very vanilla or locked-down system where you run only one or two apps and don't install third party software. Linux, and particularly Ubuntu or other distros with good package management, enables you to install a huge number of apps very easily *and they keep working*. My uptime on my Ubuntu box is regularly up in the months, but on my Windows box it's down to a few days, mostly due to the lockups.

BTW my Windows laptop above is behind a firewall but it isn't locked down fortunately. I'm sure a locked down Windows box is stable, but with Linux you can have a configurable, extensible system that can still be centrally administered for the core components and apps.

SuSE's whole 'we work better with Microsoft' is mostly marketing spin, and the Novell/Microsoft deal is incredibly dangerous. SuSE does apparently work well with MS networks, but so do some other distros, and there's nothing (apart from this sort of patent deal) preventing any distro picking up on SuSE's improvements.

Microsoft is not doing the Novell deal to help the Linux world - over time it will try to limit and encumber Linux with all sorts of required licenses, to control more and more of the Linux ecosystem.

The citation is in this netcast

[christian.einfeldt]

Please read Pamela Jones' referenced article. The quote you are asking about is taken from a netcast linked in the first paragraph in Pamela's article. The page with the link to the netcast is here [peapodcast.com], clicking on this link [peapodcast.com] will launch the mp3 file with that netcast. Those same links are pasted in their respective orders below, in case any one needs to copy and paste:

http://www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/index.html#osssig-2007-09-26-18-00-48 [peapodcast.com]

http://www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/MTLC-MS-Novell-2007-09-26.mp3 [peapodcast.com]

One thing that I really liked about this netcast: At one point, one of the Microsoft guys makes a huge concession, without really realizing it, because he states it so much as a matter of fact, and so much as an after thought. He says something like, "yeah, most of the students coming out of university are trained on Linux. I was a computer science student, and so I appreciate how great it is to be able to see the source code."

As IBM said in its GNU Linux commercials, "the future is open."

Another interesting thing: one of the Microsoft guys says "We've got the largest Linux server farm west of the Rockies!" All of these quotes are summaries, not verbatim quotes. Listen for yourself if you want the exact quote.

And yet another interesting quote by one of the Microsoft guys. "We walk around talking to our engineers, and they say, 'open source is such a cool way to get feedback. No wonder developers like to work in an open source environment.' " Again, that is a summary. Please listen for yourself to get the exact quote.