11.27.06
Posted in Action, Boycott Novell, Novell at 2:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Technocrat, which is the Web site where Bruce Perens initially (and correctly) predicted Microsoft’s yet-to-come ‘FUD campaign’, is reporting, through Bruce himself, that the “strong feeling on this issue seems to be very widespread”. Over 2000 people have signed his Open Letter. Meanwhile, ComputerWorld has just published an article titled “Microsoft and Novell pull a SCO”. Below lies a snippet.
The shape of this agreement suggests that Microsoft and Novell have learned from the best, the corporate strategic masterminds at The SCO Group. The scheme there, which you may recall Microsoft championed early and loudly, was to declare that Linux incorporated source code protected by SCO Group copyrights. This declaration gave SCO the power to send out threatening letters to software vendors and customers. The letters said, in essence, that the lucky recipient could pay SCO a license fee now, or risk having its name added to the big list of defendants in its case and pay far more.
As mentioned previously, this type of comparison is intended to stir up strong feelings and reactions. This may be an overstatement that instills fear, if not a case of ‘trolling’ for traffic, so you are advised take it with a grain of salt.
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Posted in Deals, Novell, Patent Covenant, Ubuntu at 1:54 am by Shane Coyle
OwlManAtt has a wide-ranging writeup that touches on the Novell-Microsoft deal, also raising questions about whether Novell’s deal violates the GPL2 and the prospects of designing GPL3 to prevent “Novellization“, an analysis of the Microsoft Patent Pledge, Mark Shuttleworth’s letter to the OpenSUSE mailing list and Ubuntu’s decision to include proprietary drivers in its next release, in its quest for “Multimedia Enablement”. Like I said, it is wide-ranging.
Novell, being everybody’s favorite knight-in-shining-armor has apparently decided that all of its users need to pay the Microsoft tax. To quote Microsoft’s general counsel:
And you’ll see, as well, an economic commitment from Novell to Microsoft that involves a running royalty, a percentage of revenue on open source software shipped under the agreement.
And by doing this, they are appearing as if they agree that Linux does indeed infringe upon patents held by Microsoft. They do indeed nod their head to Steve’s unfounded claims. But hey – you’re Novell. You didn’t base your entire Linux business around a community of idealogical people who don’t even work for you. You don’t depend on them to improve your product, only paying a small and elite team to put the finishing touches on SUSE and ship it. And you did not just spit in their faces and shake hands with the devil.
Oh, shit, wait. You did!
Indeed you did, Novell. Also raised in the entry is the question regarding whether Novell’s submissions to projects can now be trusted:
And their pledge to OpenSUSE developers – what does this mean for us?
Well, what if Novell wants to contibute code back into the GNOME tree. Or the Samba tree. Or the kernel itself. How are we to know that their contributions are not ‘tainted’? Is it possible that they might write something as a part of their Windows compatability project with Microsoft that obviously violates a patent? They are licensed to redistribute it. The rest of the world is not. That goes against the spirit of the GPL.
These are all valid questions, should the community continue to support a company that admittedly acted selfishly in making this deal? A company that deliberately worked to sidestep the very license that allows them to distribute the community’s work? A company which is trying to proprietize Linux and OSS, and has agreed to pay royalties to a monopolist for interoperability information and undermined the EC Antitrust ruling? No, we should not support Novell in their selfish and short-sighted partnership with Microsoft.
Boycott Novell.
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11.26.06
Posted in GPL, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft at 9:09 pm by Shane Coyle
The GNU General Public License, Version 2, is the license that applies to redistribution of a great many Free Software projects, many of which are included in Novell’s Linux offerings. I would like to contrast some aspects of the GPL 2 and the words of Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Microsoft Corporation at the news conference.
The GNU GPL is a license that covers copying, redistribution, and modification – it is not an End User License Agreement, there is no restriction on your use of GPL software ever, but there are rules for redistribution. Of particular note in reference to the Novell-Microsoft deal is Section 7 (emphasis mine):
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances.
It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice.
This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License.
Now, here are some of Brad Smith’s words from the day of the deal, particularly in reference to the Patent aspects of the agreement and Novell’s payment of royalties on their Open Source Software offerings:
To do that one of the things we fashioned was an approach that will ensure, for example, that every customer who purchases a subscription, for example, for SUSE Enterprise Linux, will get not only service and support from Novell, but will get as part of that, in effect, a patent covenant from Microsoft. We knew that this was something we had to figure out a way to accomplish, because that was the number one thing that customers were telling us. Customers told us that they wanted us to find a way to address the patent issues directly among ourselves in the industry, so they wouldn’t have to figure out how to deal with these things instead.
By fashioning this covenant we’ve been able to do that. Today Novell is the only company in our industry that is able to provide a customer not only with the code to run Linux, not only the service and support for it, but the patent, a patent covenant that runs for Microsoft Corporation, and that we think is very important, again, as you heard from Ron, for all of the customers in the industry.
There is, of course, a little bit of economics involved, as they always are, and you’ll see in the press release some references to this, although you’ll also see that we’re not announcing any numbers today. But, as you’ll see in the press release it makes clear that on the patent side, we dealt with both of these sides of the equation. We dealt with the need for an up-front balancing payment, a balancing payment that runs from Microsoft to Novell, reflecting among other things the large relevant volume of the products that we have shipped. And you’ll see, as well, an economic commitment from Novell to Microsoft that involves a running royalty, a percentage of revenue on open source software shipped under the agreement.
The terms of Microsoft’s Patent Pledges are restrictive and discriminatory, not allowing for any redistribution of code outside of contributing to OpenSUSE.org (for Novell’s benefit), and not allowing commercial interests any rights.
If Novell has entered into this “Patent Covenant”, agreeing to paying royalties in return for these Microsoft license terms for their users, therefore allowing its partner Microsoft to limit their user’s redistribution rights, are they violating the GPL? Or, is it the brilliance of this deal that now Novell customers would be violating the GPL if they redistribute, since they are the ones with the rights which cannot be passed on?
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Posted in Finance, Novell at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In the midst of a certain coversation today, an old story returned to my mind. It’s dated September 25th, 2006. Thus, this happened roughly 4 months after secret negotiations with Microsoft had begun.
Open source software maker Novell said last Friday its board approved the increase of its president and chief executive’s base salary to US$825,000 per year.
I feel obliged to quote Mark Kent who said “Always follow the money. Anyway, all those people out there writing code which Novell sell on – your code has been used to provide the Novell Board with pay rises, and they’re agreeing that you are in the firing line for a Microsoft legal attack!
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11.25.06
Posted in Action, Boycott Novell, Novell at 12:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
While the impact of the petition may be nothing but words and promises, we also observe action being taken.
Professor Keats shared the mail with the South African anti-software patent mailing list, and gave permission to share it further.
Dear Stafford,
This is a personal email from me, not an official policy of UWC. However, as the custodian of IT at UWC, I will be pursuing a full investigation into a total exit strategy for all Novell products from the University of the Western Cape.
As a non-trivial CUSTOMER of Novell, we will be looking at all our Novell applications during the next 3-4 months, with a view to finding the fastest possible way to get ALL NOVELL PRODUCTS completely out of our environment. As a company that we have been customers of for over a decade, Novell has let us down badly, and as customers, you may expect us to vote with our feet and encourage others within the education domain to do the same.
[...]
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Posted in OpenSUSE, Ubuntu at 12:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
No-one other than Andreas Jaeger wound up praising Ubuntu for its Open Week.
Ubuntu’s open week sounds like a really good idea. I’m just surprised that it is done to get users away from openSUSE as Mark Shuttleworth announced on the opensuse mailing lists.
Andreas is one of the roots, if not the principal figure of authority, in the Opensuse project. To put things in context, Mark Shuttleworth invited SUSE developers whilst some people are giving up SUSE, often migrating to or sticking with variants of Ubuntu. This statement by Andreas is therefore quite bold yet generous. It does, however, seem as though Shuttleworth crossed the picket fence and invaded mailing lists of competitors. I am aware of Red Hat employees who read the SUSE mailing lists, but I doubt they actively participate rather than just lurk or post off-list.
Addendum:
Here is the message that started it all.
[opensuse] Invitation to OpenSUSE developers
- From: Mark Shuttleworth [mark at xxxxxxxxxx]
- Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 18:16:57 +0000
- Message-id: <45673719.9020906 at xxxxxxxxxx>
Novell’s decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the community. If you are an OpenSUSE developer who is concerned about the long term consequences of this pact, you may be interested in some of the events happening next week as part of the Ubuntu Open Week:
[...]
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Posted in Deals, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents, SUN at 12:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Shortly after the infamous deal had been made, I happened to have spotted an article about Sun’s deal with Microsoft. It goes back to 2004.
Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said that it is looking for ways to work more closely with developers of the Open Office open source project, while at the same time, apparently reserving the right to sue them, according to a legal agreement between Microsoft and Open Office’s major sponsor, Sun Microsystems Inc., made public this week.
PJ has just posted the following analysis. It compares Novell’s deal with Sun Microsystems’ deal.
What do I think Microsoft is doing with these deals? I suspect they are making deals with every entity that has patents, clearing the deck so it can attack Red Hat and the entire Open Source method of development. Whatever is left standing will be firmly inside Microsoft’s embrace, and you know as well as I do what that historically means.
The way this is bound to develop will be interesting for many reason. Among those reasons we have OpenOffice, which is fundamentally the main link between the two deals. While the OpenOffice team approves and supports the deal, Novell can be scrutinised over that very same legal timebomb.
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11.24.06
Posted in Action, FSF, GPL, Novell at 11:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
According to Bruce Perens, one ought to expect SUSE to incorporate outdated packages or face some hard financial dilemmas.
“In the face of these [GPLv2 to GPLv3] changes, Novell will probably be stuck with old versions of the software, under old licenses, with Novell sustaining the entire cost and burden of maintaining that software,” Perens wrote, adding that Novell faces a choice of sticking with Microsoft and being left behind, or turning its back on the patent deal.
Matt Asay goes further and mocks Novell’s judgment.
Again, if Microsoft’s patents are only worth $40M or so, and Novell’s are worth $300M, then does anyone have anything to fear about Microsoft’s patent rattling? If their value is comparatively worthless, why is anyone bothering to take them seriously (this assumes, of course, that someone is)?
This confirms what many people argued before. The sums appear nonsential, which leads to suspicion that the motives go beyond what meets the eye. Microsoft’s legal department is nothing to sneeze at and, quite evidently, Novell has been fooled. It’s time to escape the deal (to the extent possible) and save SUSE before it’s too late.
The recent Open Letter/petition illustrates the fact that a lot of damage has already been done and continues to be done at present, primarily because the management is reluctant to admit its mistake. The intention of this site is not to religiously bash and damage Novell, but rather to knock it back into its senses, rather than let it be driven to a state of bankruptcy. Pressure might be the only path to remedy.
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