12.21.06
Posted in Deception, GPL, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat at 11:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Let us suppose that Red Hat was right all along. RHEL is Unfakeable, not Unbreakable. Despite the predatory betrayal and the decreased support costs, Oracle can only attract 300 downloads per day.
In the first 30 days, we had 9,000 downloads of Unbreakable Linux from our website and hundreds of customers connecting their servers to our network.
This brings us to Novell’s GPL ripoff/sellout. Novell may suffer from the same PR backlash. It can never use organic surveys to attract informed customers, let alone a few optimistic minds, whose mind is disconnected from that of the beyrayed developers and peers.
Related articles:
Unbreakable Linux still unproven, analyst warns
IT managers running Red Hat Linux should think carefully before making the switch to Unbreakable Linux, the new Linux distribution that Oracle Corp. announced last month.
Our View: Don’t Fear Oracle’s Linux
Opinion: Oracle’s move will actually help Red Hat by boosting Linux’s already-growing presence in the enterprise.
Red Hat Dismisses Threat Posed by Oracle and Microsoft
Red Hat Inc’s executive vice president of worldwide sales, Alex Pinchev, has dismissed the impact that Oracle Corp’s entry into the Linux support business could have on Red Hat, insisting Oracle does not really know what it is doing.
Oracle up to bat: Red Hat bashing possible
The wild-card in all this is Oracle’s take on its Linux support initiative and what that means for Red Hat. Now it is possible Oracle won’t mention Linux, but typically Larry Ellison slaps some rival around and talking trash against SAP has got to be getting old.
Addendum: for the sake of comparison, Novell sees roughly 5,600 downloads a day; RHEL (not Fedora) is donwloaded about 12,500 per day. The moral of the story is that those who play fair certainly appeal to the customer. In fact, based on the latest from MarketWatch, “Red Hat is expected to report earnings per share of 12 cents for the third quarter, according to analysts polled by Thomson First Call.“
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Posted in Action, Boycott Novell, Deals, GPL, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 10:38 am by Shane Coyle
More human resources announcements from Waltham. Groklaw is reporting that Jeremy Allison is leaving Novell, and there is no need to speculate: it is in protest of the Microvell deal.
The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls “a mistake” which will be “damaging to Novell’s success in the future.”
His main issue with the deal, though, is “that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence, it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally.” He leaves the company at the end of this month. He explained why in a message sent to several Novell email lists, and the message included his letter to management:
“Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is *nothing* we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing,” Allison wrote. “Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs….Unfortunately the time I am willing to wait for this agreement to be changed …has passed, and so I must say goodbye.”
Head over to Groklaw for the full letter/statement, which includes a message that Allison had recently sent to Novell management:
For people who will point out to me we don’t "technically" violate the GPLv2 here’s an argument I recently made on the mailing lists.
"Do you think that if we’d have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA so we didn’t have to pay for Microsoft licenses and had decided to ship, oh let’s say, "Exchange Server" under this "legal hack" that Microsoft would be silent about it – or we should act aggr[i]eved when they change the EULA to stop us doing this?"
It is always heartening to see folks take a stand for their beliefs, I wish Jeremy continued luck and success and applaud his taking a stand against this selfish deal.
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Posted in Deals, Deception, FUD, Intellectual Monopoly, Interoperability, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, Patent Covenant, Patents at 1:30 am by Shane Coyle
As the saying goes, there are two sides to every story.
Novell has said, over and over, that their deal with Microsoft is an interoperability deal, with the IP considerations and Patent Covenant being a minor aspect of the deal.
Of course, we know that Microsoft sees the deal much differently, and the companies have agreed to disagree to date over the significance of the deal.
In an interview with Computer News Middle East, Microsoft’s Bill Hilf provided more on Microsoft’s perspective on the deal:
CNME There have been looming questions for years if Microsoft would file lawsuits over intellectual property contained in Linux. What is Microsoft’s motivation with Novell?
Hilf: This is an intellectual-property deal. There will be an overlap at some point between our intellectual property and open source that we have to resolve. We knew that. It was going to happen. It was just a question of when.
We said let’s put in place something that allows us to a) establish a process for how we can work with an open-source company on our intellectual property, b) do it in such as way that it can still work within the [GNU] GPL [general public license] and c) how do we do this in a way where we can clearly draw the line between the community developer, the non-commercial open-source community guy writing code and the commercial developer who is using open-source code.
CNME: What is the overlap between what Microsoft does and what the open-source community does?
Hilf: We have the largest software patent portfolio in the world. With open source we needed to have something in place where we knew that if our intellectual property was infringed upon we had a framework in place to resolve that in an effective way. The terms of the agreement that relate specifically to what we call covenants for Novell customers are related to the fact that those customers will be deploying a variety of open source.
We said there is a way we can cover that customer and still have value for our intellectual property. The second part is there is a large class of people in the community who are writing software for free and are not selling it and who may either intentionally or inadvertently step into that footprint of our intellectual property. What we are trying to do is draw the line between people who make money from this and people who don’t.
It is a relatively short, but pointed, interview relating almost entirely to Microsoft’s open source and intellectual property philosophies, and how the Novell deal relates. Interestingly, the word interoperability never arises, but then again like Mr. Hilf said, it’s an intellectual-property deal.
One thing that Microsoft and Novell apparently do agree upon is the exclusion of ‘commercial’ developers from their patent covenant, here is Novell South Africa country manager Stafford Masie at the recent CITI Forum Q&A:
Let me address ‘the only SUSE and why?’, I think its because we… because of the SUSE acquisition, the OpenSUSE distribution is within our fold, so we represent that distribution and this agreement with Microsoft, again, wasn’t just an openSUSE agreement, that’s part of the covenant exception for Linux but that covenant extends… it overarches all of our patent portfolio, so its the proprietary patent portfolios and its the open source innovations, etc so its both areas covered – so lets not make it agreement only for opensuse, it was an interoperability agreement with Microsoft this covenant is in place from a patent protection perspective for our entire range of technologies as far as that interoperability is concerned in Linux, so…
Secondly is, this is not exclusive, this is not an exclusive arrangement with Microsoft and we are encouraging Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc to consider a similar agreement, if it makes sense to them, with Microsoft. We, we are encouraging that, especially from a, y’know, patent perspective…
Not for commercial gain? Yes. Those that are hacking, the participants, we are protecting. People that are making a career out of it, people… this covenant does not protect those people, but everything else that we do protects you. We’ve got the OIN, we’ve got indemnification, there are so many other vehicles that have not been nullified by this agreement that you can gain access to.
So, again, make sure that you don’t look at it as an only OpenSUSE thing, it is a broader Microsoft-Novell interoperability that addresses SUSE, because SUSE is ours, and those that are doing it for commercial purposes, they’re covered by, I believe, the other vehicles we have in place, OK?
So, will Novell claim that Hilf’s comments have been taken out of context as well, or will they admit that Microsoft has had a different agenda from the very beginning?
Of course, perhaps Novell truly believes they can handle their agenda, whatever it may be.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Interoperability, Microsoft, Novell, Servers, SLES/SLED, Virtualisation at 12:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Some time ago, Microsoft and Novell announced joint courses for GNU/Linux and Windows. Microsoft Watch has taken its time to comment on this arrangement.
Another funny item is the slide titled “A Joint Solution,” which depicts a symbolic heterogeneous environment with a Windows logo hovering above six clip-art servers next to a SUSE logo sitting above three clip-art servers. That’s probably the sort of ratio that Microsoft is hoping to see moving forward.
This interesting little observation reveals subtle clues.
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