Possible sources of tension between Novell and Sun are numerous. However, they have traditionally gotten along just fine when it comes to OpenOffice.org.

Recently we spotted some cheeky activity from Novell's Micheal Meeks. Novell is still trying to gain control and it’s problematic for a plethora of reasons. As shown before, Novell supports OOXML and it is also paid by Microsoft to obey its needs for OpenOffice.org (patent ‘tax’, OOXML ‘enhancements’, Windows 'advantage', et cetera).

Now comes this interview that everyone seems to be talking about.

derStandard.at: Coming back to the question of copyright assignment: Isn’t Novell doing the same with some of its own projects like Mono?

Meeks [of Novell]: That’s a really good question. If you look at Mono, it’s true that Novell has a stated company policy of requiring copyright assignment for the core – the JIT – which is some tiny proportion of the code, less than 15 percent. So Mono is a huge thing, there are the class libraries, there is all this infrastructure, all these pieces are usable in other places. It’s the core that is kept LPGL and it’s done so for commercial reasons and we are very upfront about that. So if you want to contribute to Mono, you can contribute in 80+ percent of the project without assigning rights to anyone. We’d love that to be the case with OpenOffice.org, honestly.

Sun is actually trying to push the problem off to plug-ins, by not requiring copyright assignment there. So the software ships pretty broken and in order to actually open your document you have to be online and download this thing from the public extension repository. And the OpenOffice.org user experience is already bad enough without anyone saying “your are going to have to install this, go to this webpage, look at our advert and then download it”.

derStandard.at: Which parts are you referring to?

Meeks: Interestingly there are several pieces which are deliberately not installed by default to drive traffic to the plug-ins-site. There is this thing called “report builder”, which is really a key part of the database thing. So as you get where it should be it says “There is something which isn’t here, why don’t you get it from the plug-in repository” and that’s just an appalling user experience, there is no need for that, it doesn’t offer you any efficiency wins.

derStandard.at: Being fed up with the current situation with Sun, you seem to be pushing harder for your own OpenOffice.org version with Go-oo.

Meeks: That’s right.

Matt Asay, who occasionally bashes OpenOffice.org, sidles with his former employer Novell, perhaps not realising the danger of Microsoft controlling OpenOffice.org transitively. █

As further reading material consider:

• Privileged Access on Linux
• Available Now: OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows
• OpenOffice.org Tipping Point?
• Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks
• Questions I’d like to see asked about the Microsoft-Novell deal

Hardcore and dedicated users of SuSE Linux were either receptive or cautiously optimistic when Novell snatched SuSE. This whole thing happened with IBM’s assistance and endorsement, but both IBM and Novell are proprietary software companies. As we mentioned the other day, a substantiated rumour came up about Red Hat's past consideration or attempts to buy SuSE and it’s interesting to find out now about Sun’s involvement too (before it entered the open source arena).

Chew on that last one for a bit. Way back in 2002/2003, Sun might have been in the Linux business, while Novell might have kept fiddling with NetWare (but more likely would have gone actively into the open-source applications realm, following on its acquisition of Ximian). We would have been living in a very different open-source industry if things had gone Sun’s way back then.

Better? Worse? I don’t know. But different.

As we pointed out yesterday, Novell is now just harming Sun at the moment, and not just because of its less-than-wanted interventions with OpenOffice.org, OOXML support and OpenSolaris FUD. Might it accept Sun’s offer of Java out of the box? That might be the real test or faith and commitement. From the news:

Sun woos Linux distros with bundle deals

The goal is for distros to come with Sun’s open source Java Enterprise Edition project Glassfish, the NetBeans development framework, and the Java Standard Edition project OpenJDK.

Sun is reaching out to Debian, after parts of Glassfish began showing up in the distro – Sun would, obviously, like to see all of Glassfish ship with Debian.

Sun is also working to build on early work with Ubuntu. As of now, OpenJDK is available in the Hardy Heron release of Ubuntu.

It’s truly confirmed now that, as the following article exclaims, “Java [to be] 100 per cent open source by end of this year.”

Sun is to open source the last closed-source parts of Java, a move that should make it possible to fully integrate the software into Linux distributions.

Will Novell jump on board? Miguel is boasting Google’s investment in Mono projects, which is pretty much a move against Java (the GPL’s new friend), if not Google as well. What is Novell thinking? It is a lot more committed to Microsoft than it is to Sun, let alone Red Hat and Ubuntu. Diplomacy plays a considerable role here, but if Novell increasingly sidles with Microsoft, then it will — by association — become a greater enemy of the GPL. For shame, Novell. █

Before (SuSE 6.0)

After: O SuSE, where Art Thou?

The (patent) Troll Tracker marks it 100^th post and talks about a mind-boggling trend that contradicts with what the Establishment wished us to believe. According to some statistics, as mentioned in recent weeks on numerous occasions, patent trolling is rising fast.

This is really the year of the patent troll. Last year, approximately 6,000 defendants were sued nationwide in about 2,800 patent cases. This year, the 6,000th defendant was sued sometime in early October. With the number of cases up nationwide probably 5% over last year, we’re still projected for at least a 30% increase in the number of defendants sued. More on that data in a later post.

Acacia is among those that are listed. Needless to mention, this backs suggestions for a reform. In fact, this shows us that lawyers are entering a jubilant era at the expense of developers and end-users/consumers. As evidence of these troublesome affairs, here is one patent case that was seen as news coverage-worthy.

Japan’s Canon won a patent lawsuit against a recycled ink cartridge supplier as the country’s Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal against a lower court decision in favor of the camera and office gear maker.

We must all be wondering about the mother of all patent trolls (at least the one most relevant to GNU/Linux). Mother ship is still up to no good.

Microsoft is trying to patent automatic goodbye messages, including “Have a great afternoon!” and “Ciao, Harry!”

Other than a reform, from a FOSS developer’s point-of-view, the least one can do is make use of the GPLv3, which extends patent coverage. The FSF has just released a quick guide to GPLv3.

Listed below are a bunch of older patents from Microsoft that take some nerve to file.

• Microsoft Deems Emotiflags Patent-Worthy
• Microsoft patent hints at pay-as-you-go OS
• In Microsoft Patent App, TV Watches You
• Advertising that is relevant to a person – classic case of patent trolling
• MS Seeks Patent On Virtual Fuzzy Dice
• Will Microsoft Put The Colonel in the Kernel?
• Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems
• Microsoft stole KittenAuth, renamed it and claimed it as their own.
• Microsoft files further adware patent
• Fun with Google Patent Search: Why does the maker of Windows hold a patent on a door hinge?
• Did Microsoft just patent sudo?
• Microsoft patents BlueJ

However, Meeks is not ruling out an eventual forking of OOO if Sun refuses to give up its control of the project and establish an independent non-profit foundation to govern it.

Concerns about a possible fork arose because the Go-OO build, an OpenOffice implementation maintained by Meeks and others, decided to include a feature that Sun rejected for inclusion in the next OpenOffice because the developer refused to sign Sun’s contributor agreement.

Meeks said in an interview that it is customary for Go-OO to include new technologies and that the latest build should not be viewed as a fork. But he hinted that a fork is not out of the question if Sun doesn’t loosen its grip on the OpenOffice project.

“It’s clear that if Sun continues to refuse to include changes under their own license then you will see a growing set of changes that can’t be included in OpenOffice, and then we’d see that delta increasing over time. Eventually, users can understand they can get a better OpenOffice than at OpenOffice.org,” Meeks said this week during a telephone interview.

It would appear, that according to Simon Phipps, Sun is at this time content with the changes that they have made in recent weeks – including the replacing of the Contributor Agreement and creation of a Community Advisory Board. Phipps goes on to question Meeks’ motivation for mounting this challenge now, after having been an historical supporter of the contributor agreement.

In his blast at Novell’s Meeks, Phipps points to great strides made by OpenOffice over the past several months, including new participation by Red Flag 2000 and IBM.

“In the midst of all this, I see my friend Michael Meeks has been challenging Sun in a creative way – it even made Slashdot today. I remember the days when Michael used to enthusiastically encourage OpenOffice.org community members to sign the contributor agreement, as recently as last December…,” Phipps wrote on his blog recently, questioning Mr Meeks’ motives. It’s a shame Michael has chosen now – a turning point in OpenOffice.org and a moment when Sun has radically improved the SCA in response to broad feedback from many communities – as a time to mount a fresh challenge to Sun that by implication also harms OpenOffice.org. And when you distill out all the details, that’s what this turns out to be even by Michael’s admission – a competitive issue, not a community one.”

So, it appears that the line in the sand has been drawn between Sun and Meeks, yet we still have not heard anything in an official capacity from Novell. I would expect there to be quite a bit more from both sides on this highly contentious subject in the coming weeks leading up to the first meeting of the Community Advisory Board, and perhaps beyond.

Well, now let’s look at the present times – all over the web, reports abound about the Novell-Sun rift and Michael Meeks forking of OpenOffice.org. Some say it is a fork, some say it is not, and this all sounds very familiar but a little confusing – again.

Charles H. Schulz has written a piece that was published on Groklaw which attempts to shed some light on the background of the dispute, and offers some conjecture on what Meeks’ motivation may be:

Bear with me now: The OpenOffice.org project is developing import filters for OpenXML, but not export filters. Why? Because, I believe, it does not want to make a service to Microsoft by being the second major office suite to produce OpenXML documents on the fly. Novell sees this issue from a different point of view, but let’s not get carried away. Working with Microsoft on interoperability, as Novell claims, includes working on OpenXML filters and plugins. While Novell contributes quite normally to OpenOffice.org’s import filters, it is also developing an OpenXML export filter that won’t be available in OpenOffice.org– that is, if you choose to use OpenOffice.org and not “Open Office, Novell Edition”. And since these export filters are supposedly developed in collaboration with Microsoft, this technology would logically include Microsoft’s sacred intellectual property that Sun and many others don’t want to see covered by the JCA. This could, perhaps, explain Michael’s odd questions on this list of OpenOffice.org

So these new builds from Novell would thus include new features, but features that will carry sometimes an unverified intellectual property. And that’s certainly an issue if Microsoft joins the game. Would that mean Michael’s move was made in order to serve some corporate interests?

So, it looks like Novell is indeed intent on making available a fully OOXML-compatible, yet likely IP-encumbered, version of Novell OpenOffice.org – features that will not or cannot be sent back upstream. Of course, they cannot rightfully be expected to pay Microsoft their per-unit royalty on all copies of OOO that is distributed, as their thirty pieces of silver just doesn’t stretch that far, so fork they must.

Hey, who knows, perhaps over in that joint-interoperability lab of theirs, Microvell is also working on full native ODF support for Microsoft Office. (I’m still pulling for you to be right, Stafford, and sometimes I wish I was more often wrong.)

“GPLv3 ensures you are free to remove the handcuffs. It doesn’t forbid DRM, or any kind of feature. It places no limits on the substantive functionality you can add to a program, or remove from it. Rather, it makes sure that you are just as free to remove nasty features as the distributor of your copy was to add them,” he continued.

“Tivoization is the way they deny you that freedom; to protect your freedom, GPLv3 forbids tivoization,” wrote Stallman, who is known for his uncompromising views favoring free software.

Professor Moglen says more on the purpose of GPLv3 in the following short segment of his recent interview with

These points are very important because Microsoft and Novell are likely to argue that GPLv3 is nothing but a well-targetted vendetta. They could call it a nasty sting rather than an evolutionary step that protects developers who embrace an upgraded licence.

GPL 3 is now on track to be finalized in August. Its adoption will be a major milestone in the open-source industry and will force developers of GPL-licensed software to make choices about migrating to the new license or contributing to a potential schism between version 2 and version 3 software.

It gets even better. After hesistation and reluctance from Linux kernel hackers to adopt GPLv3, comes this:

Open source guru Alan Cox has voiced his support for the controversial version 3.0 of the GNU General Public Licence in an exclusive podcast interview with Computer Weekly.

You may also recall an interview where Linus Torvalds said he was pleased with the recent changes to the GPLv3 draft. The following survey showed wide support among developers as well.

A survey of open-source programming experts that start-up OpenLogic pays to resolve software troubles has revealed some favorable feelings about the new third draft of the General Public License (GPL).

Systematic and malovalent attempts to create GPLv3 scare may no longer be effective. Novell’s and Microsoft’s attempts to discredit GPLv3 are proven to have become weaker when people looked and judged the licence for themselves, as well as observed the way the draft had evolved. Several months ago, a few kernel hackers dismissed the new licence despite admitting that they never read it for.

If the licence is accepted adopted widely, then it may be time for Novell shareholders to spend money on a lot of forks (and still be left behind, essentially stuck in 2007 while rivals fly ahead).

In his analysis Wilder claimed that “at some point, efforts to block patent licenses that were legally entered into and fully consistent with contract law, as well as the intellectual property laws enacted by Congress, begin to expose those developing and agreeing to GPLv3 to potential defenses and counterclaims.”

Perens dismissed that as nothing more than words designed to create the impression that the Free Software Foundation is going against the law, violating existing contracts and even running afoul of Congress, all without stating any facts to back up the assertion.

With regard to Wilder’s contention that “efforts by non-parties to force or induce a party to abrogate a validly entered-into contract or forgo entering into a prospective contract can give rise to a cause of action for tortious interference,” Perens said that he cannot see how providing a new version of software under a new license—when another version under another acceptable license like GPL 2 exists—could ever be considered to be tortious interference.

Perens also dismisses allegations of group boycott or refusal to supply, and argues that Microsoft has become a Linux distributor – bound not only by the upcoming GPLv3, but also the current GPLv2 and it’s patent provisions:

But, to Perens, the fact that Microsoft is currently giving to customers coupons that can be redeemed for a copy of SUSE Linux indicates that these coupons are intended to be redeemed for a copy of the copyrighted GPL 2 software.

“So, Microsoft is actively participating in distribution of the GPL2 software today, and must have assented to GPL 2 to do that, because any distribution without assent to GPL2 would be infringement. Under GPL 2, they have already given away the rights to use Microsoft patents that are applied in the Novell distribution, for any use in any GPL software, by anyone, forever,” Perens said.

Perhaps Stafford Masie was more correct than even he knew at the time, and even cooler – SUSE can go and reenable the sub-pixel rendering, after all.

Fortunately, Novell is still the the centre of this debate, so it’s unlikely to see any exemptions. From Linux Planet:

Now that the third draft of GNU Public License (GPL) version 3 is out the door, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) will be “actively” seeking out comments from the open source community–and officials expect to get particularly strong response around provisions involving the Novell/Microsoft deal and so-called “Tivo-ization” in embedded devices.

O’Reilly Radar takes a careful look at the language which addresses the Novell/Microsoft deal and simplifies all the ‘legal speak’.

Translating that into plain English, it says: If you distribute GPLd software and make a deal with another company who also distributes (some kind of) software, we will stop you from distributing the GPLd software if:

a) you pay the other company
b) the deal mentions the GPLd software
c) you get a patent license
d) the patent license mentions the GPLd software
e) the patent license has more limited terms than the GPL license on the software

In a new interview with Richard Stallman, Novell gets a mention as well.

Q: Very well. On the Microsoft side the ink was still drying on the Novell deal when Mr. Ballmer implied again that GNU/Linux infringes Microsoft patents. Are such threats credible?

Richard Stallman: Well, every large program infringes lots of patents. Microsoft has lots of patents. Most large programs, I would expect, infringe some Microsoft patents. This just goes to show why software patents shouldn’t exist.

Lastly, a new review of Opensuse 10.2 spells out one of the main disadvantages of this GNU/Linux distribution.

With the recent cloud formed over Novell striking a deal with Microsoft, many in the open source and Free software community are concerned about the direction in which Novell is going to steer SuSE in the future. There are also aspersions cast on whether this fine GNU/Linux distribution will remain Free at all.

Bruce Perens will be holding a press conference to coincide with Novell’s upcoming Brainshare conference, here is the announcement and a list of topics.

Bruce Perens, director of Action on Technology Policy and initiator of the Open Letter to Novell that has been signed by thousands, will hold a press conference during Novell’s Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah next week. The topics will be

• The Microsoft-Novell agreement
• GPL version 3 and how it will impede Novell from making use of new innovation by the Free Software community
• Software patents vs. Free Software

The event is open to working press and to Open Source community representatives who will report the event online or help operate the event. There is an attendee list. For admission and event details, write to bruce at perens dot com.

This should be uncomfortable, too.

Related Posts: Stafford Masie’s Q&A at CITI Forum Transcript

Stafford Masie:

This whole Novell thing, the whole Microsoft thing, is an interesting thing. so, let me just start off by saying… thanks for making the time, thanks for making the time to see me. Pete was supposed to be up here this morning, and I decided to come,…

Really what I want the premise of the discussion to be is really a discussion about, I think the big thing thats gonna come up here as I go through all the…the material that I want to present initially is the patent stuff, y’know software patents and what they mean, etc I think professor Keats and I have gone back and forth online enough now.

We… we… we definitely like the fact that we have an open source community… we’re learning more and more as a proprietary vendor, traditional proprietary vendor, to participate in this community. and there are certain things that we do and there are certain things that we may not do that are good or that are bad, and y’know, really, this is what we want to do, this is what we want to do, is stir debate.

Now, as the opening speaker said there, Novell South Africa is big on the radar screen internationally for Novell worldwide, and I think this debate again puts us at the nucleus of the storm, because the email that Prof Keats sent out did make its way worldwide. and thats the beauty of the net, thats the beauty of collaboration, thats the beauty of this participation of archit… the architecture of participation I call it, is the fact that someone who sits in UWC has the power to voice their opinion, and the entire community and the world sits up and listens, and Novell makes the effort, an investment, to ensure I’m here, that we respond properly, that we get on conference calls with Derek and we explain our position clearly.

And, I think thats a good thing, thats a good thing for innovation, that someone in South Africa that never used to have a say now has the power, because of this community, because of this connectivity, because of this architecture of participation that exists for us to engage with a company as big as Novell, a 2-plus billion dollar business and have them give us attention, its a good thing.

So, one of the things that I want to ensure we.. we do this morning is discuss what has happened, I’ll outline what the agreement is, just for the sake of ensuring everyone’s on the same page and the context is defined. and define the relationship in depth, and then I’ll take questions and we’ll go back and forth, we’ll do a little bit of a Q&A

Now I don’t… this is going to be streamed, right…Derek? Online. I think this is going to be archived and streamed, that is my understanding, so… I’ll make sure that when you ask a question that I give you the mic and we can record that

Now, one of the things that, the reasons that I’m here, is I want to ensure that address Professor Keats’ issues, I think, in this forum, I think its an important forum, and I think this community, you as FOSS participants… its an important community that we interface with, and hopefully you see Novell’s commitment- me being here, taking time off, redoing the entire schedule is because we do believe that you are extremely important to us, and we want to be a valuable community member. We want to be a participant in this community that listens to what your grievances are, the issues are, and we’ll feed that back into the relevant structures within Novell.

Now, let me take you some… through some history of Novell, because I can really articulate this organically, I came back to the country end of 2003, before that I was actually at Novell headquarters, and I was part of a team that did the due diligence to get Novell into this Linux space.

So, the reason I like standing up here and talking about open source and Novell, etc because when I was in the US, I was actually part of that team, and I humbly say so, y’know not arrogantly.

And, its nice to see these things play out, because I understand exaclty what Novell’s commitments are. I know exactly why Novell is in this game, its not because I’ve read some marketing literature or I’ve gone to some orientation course as the new country manager for South Africa, therefore I’m here.

I was actually part of the team that looked at this. I know exactly why, what our conviction is and why we are in this space. We fundamentally believe that the open source way of building software is a better way of delivering software, that is why we are in the open source world. It is a better way, the way software gets built, the way this crowd becomes.. is wise and is becoming wiser, and the capabilities of this open source crowd, is a phenomena that I think stems… this is just a fruit of a broader phenomena I think things like podcasting, things like blogging, things like social networking… these are things that are moving so fast, and really it is because of Tim O’Reilly’s little phrase, he’s given it that phrase and I use it often now: the architecture of participation is there.

And, this architecture of participation allows us now to collaborate worldwide and do things that are amazing, and I think that open source software is but one fruit of this architecture of participation, so when Novell looked at this whole thing… we realized it had caught up to Netware, and in certain circumstances was surpassing Netware and… there was other aspects of it that looked very very interesting

So when we went to the Board, and we discussed with the executives at Novell, we said we have to get into this, for no other reason but the fact we’ve got to adopt this method of building code, we need to look at it very very carefully, this collaborative method of building of a software product is an interesting method, and it seems to be better, and it seems to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before because it gives people the capability to themselves change things and it creates a platform for innovation and for excellence, its an excellence model, not a commercial model.

So, we’re in open source not for commercial reasons only, we want to be a participant, we want to contribute, and I think we’ve proven that as Novell, and one of the things I didn’t do and now realize I should have done, I should have actually listed all of the open source projects that we participate in… y’know we are very large contributor to OpenOffice, and you’ll see some of the things we are now doing to OpenOffice which now some bloggers are saying we’re forking OpenOffice, which is not true, and I think some sanity is coming back to some of that reasoning…

There’s alot we do to the kernel, we’ve got alot of kernel developers… we’ve got alot of file system guys, the Samba team- the project team, the Samba project team actually works for Novell. I know the recent press releases about what the Samba team thinks about the Microsoft thing doesn’t depict them working for us, but y’know what? they actually do. They used to work for HP, but now they work within us. And then we’ve got Miguel and Nat and that entire team there.

Now, Let me take you through the legend of what occured with Novell and this whole Micr… this whole open source thing. The first step that we took was, I remember in the beginning, we looked at Red Hat very very carefully because we thought that maybe we should acquire Red Hat to get into this Linux game. Ok, the first, in fact we thought, let’s open-source Netware, we couldn’t do that.

Then we looked at Slackware and said maybe we should take Slackware, and do something with Slackware- put a big N on it and call it Novell’s Linux distribution and.. the hardware vendors said no way, so we went back and forth, and we, y’know we threw mud at this wall continuously, and nothing was sticking. and the big problem with us inside of Novell at the time was we didn’t have people who understood the Linux community, and what we are finding out every day, is that you’ve got to understand the people aspect of this community, not just the technological aspects of this community because it is critical.

Y’know Nat and Miguel, all the project leads, the big contributors within the company that work for us have to read a book and finish a course about that book, and the book is “How to Win Friends and Influence People”… they’ve got to finish that, because it is so critical I mean, when people post code, when they’re replying and providing commentary, whether its silly or not, you have to treat them a certain way, and that’s the success of your project, is collaboration. Ensuring people come there, contribute there and… their contributions are recognized, etc its a big big thing

So when we went out and looked at this Linux thing, we really thought lets jump in to this open source thing in a big way and create our own distribution. Wrong. We took a big step back.

Y’know why we bought Ximian? Does anyone know why we bought Ximian? Because they had cool software? No. We didn’t buy Ximian because of their Red Carpet software, we didn’t buy Ximian because of… the collaboration technologies that they had, we didn’t buy them for the desktop technologies that they had, we bought Ximian for one reason: we wanted people that were community heads, people that understood this community organically, that was extremely well respected, people like Nat Friedman and Miguel De Icaza, we wanted them within Novell.

Why? We needed people that understood, participated in this community, to help and assist our strategy moving forward, because we realized that if we had just bought a Linux distribution, we’d do some silly things and we’d mess up, so we needed people to really give us guidance.

And, when they came into the company, that is their major role, yes they are brilliant technologists, yes they definitely know how this thing stitches together, but the key reason they are there is to ensure that a proprietary, traditional proprietary vendor like Novell, participates properly in this community that we interact properly with this community, and thats the objective.

So thats why we bought Ximian, with Ximian came alot of these open source community stalwarts, people that were well respected, people on the Linus Torvalds level, and y’know what attracted us to Ximian, whenever they spoke at LinuxWorld in the United States, I remember seeing them, when Nat and Miguel got on stage- everybody went to their presentations. Everyone. Y’know even the Linux… the vendors that had stands at the event would leave their stands and watch Miguel and Nat, and they are amazing individuals and we wanted those type of individuals.

Now when you introduce a thing like this into your company, and you’re this proprietary Netware, Groupwise type company, its… its a hard slog, its a culture change, its a big big big culture change. Understanding wait a minute, giving away actually gives you a competitive edge vs keeping closed, its a different mindset.

Y’know its difficult to understand that y’know what, your competitive edge actually lays in collaboration and ensuring people can participate etc, versus keeping things closed and having only a small set of developers innovating around a particular thing. so, its a weird mindset and now we’re in it, we’re in it in a big way, and I’d say we’re probably the 800lb penguin now side by side, with IBM.

We’re big in this community now, our pockets are deep, we’ve got lots of technology, we’ve got a huge customer base, lots of capabilities worldwide, big footprint, huge ecosystem behind us.

So what we’re doing with Linux and this is our focus as Novell predominantly, we’re taking linux to the enterprise customer, that’s our participation in this community. We’re taking Linux to the telcoms of the world, the escoms of the world, the… standard banks of the world, the big companies in South Africa, thats our role.

So when we talk about Linux and we participate in the Linux community. yes, we do it technologically, but realize the angle to everything we are doing is an enterprise angle, we represent alot of the enterprise interests, we interface with alot of the enterprises out there, and what we find sometimes in the Linux community is alot of the developers, participants don’t have that front, and feel, that we have that enterprise customers want to see in Linux or what they want out of Linux or their understanding of Linux, etc

And, I think the Microsfot thing came from that, it came from that, and I will lead into that in a second, so Ximian- the people, then we bought SUSE, now we bought SUSE because of the direction that was given to us by people within the company that truly understood the Linux community, and I think we’ve demonstrated our willingness, I think we’ve demonstrated our commitment, i think we’ve demonstrated… our investment that we are willing to make into the community and be a responsible member of it.

And, this morning, I’m just going to go through some of the things regarding the Microsoft agreement, this morning I want to make sure that we give proper time to discuss the software patent issue, that Derek surfaced. I think its a very prominent issue, and I think this is one of the benefits of this Microsoft agreement.

Okay, one of the benefits of this agreement, it actually surfaces this debate and it becomes more personified than its ever been, this whole software patent debate, it actually does this. The GPL V3 is now being discussed more heatedly than it has ever been discussed before, Richard Stallman now has a bigger platform to discuss version 3 than he has ever before, so there’s offshoot benefits we believe to this Microsoft agreement that may not benefit Novell at the end of the day, but its going to benefit Linux

Ok, and I think one of the biggest things we can say about this agreement is the fact that it is now on everyone’s lips. Microsoft have conceded that Linux is there, Linux is real, Linux is big, Linux is relevant… Linux is primetime, and thats a huge huge concession that they’ve made, and for a vendor that big to say that Linux is here, that should say someting. Y’know and alot of our enterprise customers, that are Microsoft customers, this is the scenario today, people that are Microsoft customers are now calling us in and saying, come talk to us about this Linux thing. Come talk to us now, we didn’t want to talk to you before, but now come talk to us. That’s the benefit.

We believe this agreement is going to drive adoption of Linux extensively in the enterprise because it deals with a specific issue that’s been a huge concern for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers have been begging for interoperability between Novell’s technologies and Linux…Linux…our Linux technologies and our proprietary technologies. This agreement spans both, and the problem with this agreement at the moment is people are focusing so heavily on the covenant that has been established, and they are forgetting the rest of what this agreement means.

There’s alot more to this agreement than just the Linux aspect the Linux aspect is an also part of it, but its not the focal part of it, the focal part is the interoperability, that is the focus of this agreement- customers want to see that, and believe it or not it is customer demand that has pushed us to this point. and its not jsut us saying this, you can see IDC, I’ve got an IDC report on my laptop which I’ll show you, and a gartner report, big big customers want to adopt linux and they’re putting alot of pressure on Novell and they;re putting alot of pressure on Microsoft to say, y’know what, we don’t like this

Now,let me give you a real-world scenario of what happens, now all of you are passionate FOSS members,right, you love linux, etc. but, let me tell you what happens in the real world, the real real world, not the coding aspect, when you take this thing and you sell it to a big enterprise.

This is one example of a deal where we were involved, I wont mention the customers name, and online its been said that we should mention this customers name, I’ll pass that by our CEO, y’know its a financial company in the United States. It was a four thousand eight hundred and something server deal, ok.

We were competing with Microsoft, they were going to go with SUSE linux, their minds were pretty much made up, and y’know what happened?…what we believe happened, and I need to be careful because this is recorded, what we believe happened is that the other vendor took the customer behind closed doors and said ‘This is a big server deal, have you considered your liability associated with the GPL? have you considered potential patent infringements? have you considered the fact that we potentially may take action?’

Now, did they have a platform, did they have concrete evidence that they could? No. But, y’know, the customer came back and said, the customer said ‘Y’know what, we’re gonna go with Microsoft, but we wanna go with you but we’re gonna go with Microsoft for now, over the next two years, ok, we are going to call in an external legal entity, legal company, to review the GPL, to review Microsoft’s patent stance, to review all of this in… in the context of our business, our legal framework, and we’ll get back to you.

That’s the problem, we lost a five thousand server deal because of FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. People don’t like that.

Now, people say that indemnification is enough, y’know what, we provide indemnification for Linux, but we don’t provide indemnification for any of our other technology. indemnification scares enterprise customers, why are you providing me indemnification? That’s what customers are asking.

Now, on itweb, theres this article thats been written there that i said, they took it completely out of context again, just took just that part and nothing else it was the customers opinion that y’know what, indemnification is a concern for us, indemnification is an issue, you are telling us that there is something there, by inference, something there to be concerend about from a legal liability perspective. now you’re providing us indemnification, and it covers us as an insurance agreement, to reimburse us for any legal costs associated with those liabilitites or potential liabilities, customers don’t like that

now, it sounds good to us, as software vendors, as community members, its great to have this indemnification, Red Hat has it, etc But, to enterprise customers, they don’t like that, they don’t like the fact that that exists. They don’t want to buy a software product with this insurance agreement that proprietary software doesn’t have. Its new, its unique, they don’t like that

So, i believe this agreement actually mitigates that, it takes alot of it away, so lets go through that for a second and actually take a look at the agreement

ok, so if you go to our website, you’re going to go to novell.com/microsoft and… to me, trust me this is very very strange for me to say all the things about Microsoft that I do. ok, very very very strange, I need to meet them in South Africa, I need to go to their offices and I go to my website and I go to slash Microsoft, and its not anti-competitive, its like partnership stuff… yeah, hell has frozen over, so its a weird time

if you go up here, you’ll find alot of stuff here, there’s a webcast y’know with steve ballmer, there’s a Q&A, the announcement that we made, there’s… y’know there’s a bunch of blogs from different people within Novell and external from Novell, what industry customer and partner reactions are, apart from all the blogs that are going on that are pretty negative, in our opinion there are alot of fanatics out there that are taking bits of this and really misinterpreting it in my opinion. there’s alot of that going on at the moment, and we need to ensure that… we stop that, but I think in time it will stop

Not that Derek is one of those fanatics, and not that that was a small issue that Derek raised, I think it was an very very important issue, let me just clarify that…

and then just additional information from us, what the agreement is, etc so, instead of waiting for the 3g card to connect, I just y’know when you click on there, .. seriously there’s a broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support, now if you think the broad scope of the agreement, if you go down ok, one of the things is im not going to do a slideshow for you, im going to go to websites and take a look at stuff for real, the broad scope of it is the following: virtualization, web services for managing physical and virtual servers, and document format compatibility.

Lets start at the bottom with document format compatibility… we just released, based upon Office 2.0.2, OpenOffice 2.0.2, Novell’s edition… here you, we are actually demonstrating the fruits of this relationship.

what have we done? we’ve taken open xml from Microsoft… worked on the translation engines of that with ODF, we’ve now built open xml support into… a version of openoffice, so now it will open up the latest Microsoft Office default document standard.

We’re going to work very very closely, we have a roadmap in place for ODF translators… Open XML translators to ODF… we start releasing them in January, so there’ll be one for Word, one for Excel, one for Powerpoint, etc for the.. for the OpenOffice product,

now take a look at those, that innovation, go take a look at how that innovation is taking place, or how that interoperability is taking place, we’re doing the interoperability, and we’re publishing that under the GPL, but the LGPL, obviously, from an OpenOffice perspective.

We’ve published that out, there’s nothing proprietary there, ok now people are saying the open xml format itself is, y’know Microsoft has a little covenant associated with that and that is where the issue is, well y’know that’s an issue for everyone. we’re going to work on the interoperability aspects and we’re going to publish that innovation, that interoperability under the GPL so that shows you how this is going to play out, we’re not going to do things and violate the GPL

Now, people say, you already violate GPL version 3, no we dont because GPL version 3 is not there yet.

And, it is a good thing that GPL 3 is being discussed so extensively right now, because we are participants in that entire authoring. Y’know we talk to Stallman, and we talk to Barrett and all these people that are authors of GPL version 3, and we’ll continue to do that.

Now, as GPL version 3 matures, and Stallman has said we’re not in violation of GPL version 2 at the moment, now we’re not with the current agreement, but he believes in GPL3 he will put verbiage in there to ensure that we are.

Y’know, he wants to ensure that its not just patents that you’ve bought that will violate GPL v3 if you own them, that agreement, but the fact that an agreement like this is in place that downstream affects people… that utilize your distribution makes you in violation of GPL version 3, so we’re working very closely on the authoring of that, we will be GPL V3 compliant, trust me, we will,ok?

Will we have to alter our agreement with Microsoft to ensure that it happens? We will, we’ll do what’s right. We’ll participate, and yeah we’ll do what it takes, but its gonna be a collaborative effort.

We’ll talk to the GPL version 3 authors… like we are right now, I think common sense will prevail, because at the end of the day we actually do benefit the community being here, we do benefit, its not… it doesn’t make sense to vindictively come after some of these agreements, there’s got to be a reason behind it, and we’ll listen to that reason, and we’ll concede where we need to concede and where it makes business sense, thats always been our stance.

So, GPL v2 according to Stallman, we do not, y’know we dont infringe on the GPL2 whatsoever with this current agreement.

So, just in terms of document format compatibility, we’re not forking it, the code’s up there, hopefully that code will be incorporated into the next derivative of the OpenOffice release, as part of the code… we’ve done quite a few things there, theres the translator engine, there’s the VB macro support, where you can import excel macros into openoffice now and it will open up and it will execute, etc there’s quite few things that we’ve done there, and we’ve also we;ve licensed in some fonts… we worked with AGFA we put some truetype fonts in there, its similar to Microsofts true-type fonts in the openoffice product, and its for free, its there, so we’ve published that out.

So, again, enterprise customers want this, they want to see the product more interoperable, they want to see openoffice having the capability to open up office 2007 documents and backwards, now its good to do open xml because open xml is being supported back in Microsoft all the way to office 95 or 97, one of those, i think its office 97, they’re supporting open xml

So, essentially, you’ll be able to open up, all up to office 97 documents that come with Microsoft with office. and in turn, we are also working with Microsoft to ensure that they put native ODF support within Microsoft office. Ok, that’s key the fact that it will now open up our documents that we natively store in OpenOffice inside there.

Only five minutes? Ok.

Ok, web services, I think document format compat…, thats an improtant one because now you’ve seen the fruits of we are actually executing on the agreement and you can see how we are doing it, and its not forking- we are publishing the stuff under the GPL, we’re acting as good members there

Web services, that’s the proprietary aspects, making active directory and eDirectory work together- enterprise customers want to see that, virtualization is very very key, customers want to utilize Linux as either a host operating system with Microsoft as a guest operating system, or vice versa, and yes wea re going to support the XEN technology there, the XEN hypervisor technology, Microsoft is going to support it too. Yes, there is a competitive angle there, yes we’re coming at VMware yes yes yes we are, ok thats part of it because but we’re doing it in an open source way, so were going to support the XEN technologies in our server platforms and togther collaborate and ensure it works properly, supported properly, etc

Now as far as thats concerned, thats the technology aspects of it, now its broad from a Linux perspective, they’re essentially saying that anyone who is an OpenSUSE contributor is covered under the covenant. the covenant essentially is a patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft that says if you participate in the OpenSUSE distribution… as long as its not for commercial gain, that you are covered by this covenant, that they will not exercise what they believe is their patent rights……………………………UNEXPECTED EOF ;^ (

There was much furor over a recent Groklaw headline regarding Novell forking OpenOffice.org, with even Miguel De Icaza taking the time to respond, albeit in a somewhat "fast and loose" manner. Everyone said, "Novell forking Open Office? No way."

During Stafford Masie’s Question and Answer session at the CITI forum, he explained how Novell has two streams of Linux products – "FOSS" and "OSS", with OpenSUSE and OpenOffice.org being "FOSS" and SLE(S|D) and Novell OpenOffice.org being "OSS" Masie goes on to say that in their version of Novell OpenOffice, they add extra interoperability, backward compatibilty and testing, in addition to licensed fonts and graphic rendering engines. These differences are in addition to the Open XML support and even more controversial VBA support, which may or may not be accepted into OOO’s main branch.

So, Novell OpenOffice.org is a fork, it has been for some time, its okay and you don’t need to deny it. Correct me if I am wrong, but OOO is LGPL and as long as you do it right, you can have a version linked with proprietary stuff, Novell.

Now, it is just a question of how closely OpenOffice.org wants to follow their lead into Microsoft’s embrace, or branch off towards Freedom, that will determine just how much of a fork Novell’s OpenOffice.org becomes.