Could Novell's Disclosure Have Led to More Backlash and Harm Than Calm? (Updated)
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2007-05-27 14:03:45 UTC
Modified: 2007-05-28 06:42:16 UTC
Shane has already taken a preliminary look at Novell's recent disclosure. Next week we shall find out a lot more as prominent people analyse the text and will report to the press. Here are some early reactions. The first comes from the Wine team.
More than a few people have been angered by Novell's patent indemnification agreement with Microsoft. If you're looking a bunch of really exciting fun, you can find a redacted version of the entire agreement filed with the SEC. There's two nice bits in there about Wine. The first pretty much means Novell won't ever ship Wine (someone please correct me if I'm wrong because it's late and I might have pieced it together wrong.) Why?
Remember that Dell joined the Microsoft/Novell deal. A couple of weeks ago, just shortly after this deal, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Wine would not be included in Dell's Ubuntu PCs. A while later it turned out that proprietary multimedia codecs would not be included either. Is it a coincidence, a conspiracy, or simply a logical decision? Here is the reaction of a man who is disappointed due to these recent developments.
Dell's deliberately limited Ubuntu Linux offerings show cowardice in the face of Microsoft's displeasure, and telegraphs to the casual shopper that Linux is a very cheap (as in quality) second to Windows in terms of breadth and depth of hardware support, when it most certainly is not.
The agreement enshrines the pretzel-like position Novell has been forced to adopt because it appears to be paying Microsoft not to sue its customers for using Linux.
[...]
It looks as if the agreement makes provision for the possibility that Novell will get acquired -- it passes through -- unless, it appears, it goes to a private equity buy-out firm or a company that gets less than 10% of revenues from hardware and software. There are also safety nets for product spin-offs.
What a mouthful. More speculations are certainly yet to come our way. Here are the reactions that Novell had to face in last week's OSBC.
Corbet of LWN.net, however, accused Novell of enabling Microsoft's bad behavior. "Novell is paying Microsoft a per unit fee (on sales of SUSE Linux). If there's not a patent issue, what are you paying for?" he asked.
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The issue of patents has been front and center at OSBC... and audience members expressed disappointment at the mixed signals coming from Microsoft over possible litigation, and what many perceived as a lack of honest cooperation between Microsoft and the open source community. "I'm not afraid of Novell coming after me like I'm afraid of Microsoft coming after me," said Jon Stumpf, Senior Vice President of Engineering at AIG. "I don't need a new (collaboration) deal on virtualization or ODF. I need cooperation on standards." At other times, audience members responded with outright derision at efforts to smooth over the disagreements that have followed from the partnership.
Under the terms of the agreements, Microsoft will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on licensing fees and sales and marketing costs over five years, including $240 million for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates. For its part, Novell has agreed to pay Microsoft a percentage of revenue from open-source products.
Novell has chosen to betray the supplier in order to please a few customers (if any at all). The wrath of those who were harmed (developers and Linux peers) is going to harm Novell. What goes around comes around.
Update: a video from OSBC was published yesterday. Here it is, in case someone is interested.
SUSE's relationship with firms such as these generally means that SUSE works for authority, not for community, and when it comes to cryptography it just follows guidelines from the US government
Linux Foundation staff uses neither Linux nor Open Source. They're essentially using, exploiting, piggybacking goodwill gestures (altruism of volunteers) while paying themselves 6-figure salaries.
the powerful companies/governments/societies get to know everything about everybody, but if anyone out there discovers or shares dark secrets about those powerful companies/governments/societies, that's a "crime"
HowTos (or howtos) are very important in their own right, but they can easily distract from the news and howtos are usually quite timeless or time-insensitive
Given the number of disgruntled employees who leave Canonical and given Ubuntu's trend of just copying whatever IBM does in Fedora, is there still a good reason to choose Ubuntu?
We're already learning, over IRC, that out new site is fully compatible with simple command line- and ncurses-based Web browsers. Failing that, there's Gemini.