03.21.07
Posted in Deception, Intellectual Monopoly, Novell, Patent Covenant, Ron Hovsepian at 6:39 pm by Shane Coyle
Apparently, Ron Hovsepian does indeed regret the IP covenant aspect of the Microvell deal, and he confirms that it was Microsoft that brought that aspect of the agreement to the table in the first place.
In an interesting bit of spinning, Hovsepian describes the IP covenant as "secondary or tertiary in the discussions and it took a little bit of time for that to come out in those discussions". That really seems like a nice way of confirming Jeremy Allison’s suspicion that the IP covenant was a requirement sprung upon Novell in the latter stages of negotiations.
Anyhow, Hovsepian’s regret is that his Open Letter would have been "timelier", but I suppose it took a while for Microsoft PR to finish editing it and preparing their response, huh?
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Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Interview, Ron Hovsepian at 4:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Here is a writeup from Linus, titled “Why I ‘Absolutely Love’ GPL Version 2″. Novell’s CEO has also been interviewed about the deal with Microsoft.
How did the Novell/Microsoft deal come about?
[CEO Ron Hovsepian:] I called Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft, who was formerly CEO of Sam’s Club and prior to that he was the CIO at Wal-Mart. So I called Kevin and asked him to be a customer again and I had this conversation about interoperability and Kevin responded wonderfully to it. The rest of the senior executives on the team called me the next day and we began this march of trying to put a customer-driven relationship together
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 4:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft has launched a new and controversial anti-Linux Web site. Since it appears to be down at the moment, have a look at this modified screenshot, which tells a thousand words.
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Posted in FSF, Interview, Marketing, Novell at 4:18 pm by Shane Coyle
Novell’s PR Blog has a guest entry from Justin Steinman, in which he explains that he was indeed in error when he made those disputed statements regarding Novell’s financial support of the Free Software Foundation:
Further research inside Novell confirms that Peter Brown is correct and I spoke in error. I want to make it clear that I had no intention of making false claims or providing misinformation to the market. I simply said what I believed to be true. Now that I have learned my statement is not true, I want to correct that error.
Thus, I want to apologize to the Free Software Foundation and to the open source community for making this misrepresentation. I should have double-checked the accuracy of my information before speaking, and for that, I offer no excuse.
Since I get corrected around here all the time, I am certainly willing to believe there was no malice here – a simple error, and we move on…
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