No Free software guests are invited

Some hours ago, over in the IRC channel, the following short rant was voiced:

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<fumanchu2175> Did you hear Novell is now part of the MS virtualization validation program? <fumanchu2175> This just shows what a bad company Novell is.

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This is a residue of the 'interoperability' nonsense that we wrote about before. It's about close (and closed) collaboration that involves deals, not standards. Novell's Linux gets treated as though it is different from all the rest of the GNU/Linux distributions. There's nothing technical about it. It's solely because of the software patent alliance with Microsoft.

“They want to leave Free Linuxes out in the cold.”This brings to mind an issue that was mentioned very briefly yesterday. It was about a so-called "Open Patent Alliance", which is again a case of exclusion. As technocrat readers put it: "I think the word "Open" is a gross overstatement here. [...] It is a buzzword that has, as I'm sure you are aware, been co-opted my the marketing droids. I think they mean "RAND Pool", though I'm not interested enough to read the PDF." Virtualisation that works in this fashion is inherently incompatible with the GPL. It's no coincidence.

The Microsoft/Novell/Citrix 'virtualisation gang' seems to have just recruited Symantec as well, so it's definitely an issue to keep an eye on.

Symantec is teaming up with Citrix to attack the server virtualization market. The storage management firm has stirred Citrix's Xen code into its Veritas suite in a new offering arriving later in 2008.

Remember that they already exclude to Microsoft's benefit. They want to leave Free Linuxes out in the cold. ⬆