11.12.15
Gemini version available ♊︎Techrights Turns 9
Summary: It has been 9 years since the Novell-Microsoft deal and right now we are trying to find out just what exactly Red Hat did with Microsoft regarding patents
TECHRIGHTS has recently been focused on EPO affairs. We were always focused on patents here. That’s why we don’t write much about matters such as systemd.
As Shane Coyle put it at the very start: “The way to communicate with a corporation is economically” because Novell, when it signed a patent agreement with Microsoft, chose to “violate the very license that allows them to distribute the community’s work in the first place” (using software patents).
“We are still waiting for Red Hat staff whom we spoke to (no names needed here) to press the management of Red Hat to disclose what was agreed on, regarding patents, in the Microsoft-Red Hat deal.”Unfortunately, just 9 years later (almost exactly 9 years) Red Hat chose to betray the community in a similar way [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], but what Red Hat did is very different because no patent payments were involved, just a form of legitimisation of Microsoft’s patents. We are still waiting for Red Hat staff whom we spoke to (no names needed here) to press the management of Red Hat to disclose what was agreed on, regarding patents, in the Microsoft-Red Hat deal. We will continue to pressure for this kind of transparency from the self-acclaimed “Open Organization” [sic]. We need real answers, not in the form of some vague FAQ which does nothing to suggest entities other than Red Hat and its paid customers are ‘safe’ from Microsoft patent litigation. Remember that .NET too remains a patent trap [1, 2] and it’s part of the Microsoft-Red Hat deal. █
“There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.”
–Bob Muglia, Microsoft President
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA