Why the Novell / MS Deal Is Very Bad 367
jamienk writes "PJ from Groklaw has taken the time to really explain the big picture of the Novell/MS deal and how it all fits into the SCO case and the strategy some have employed to attack Free Software. If you thought PJ was becoming too shrill before, or if you haven't understood what the big deal is with Novell's agreement, it's really worth a read." From the article: "This is Groklaw's 2,838th article. We now have 10,545 members, who have worked very hard to disprove SCO's scurrilous claims, and we did. We succeeded, beyond my hopes when we started. But here's the sad part. As victory is in sight, Novell signs a patent agreement with Microsoft..."
WTF: Novell moves to waive SCO's case? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:WTF: Novell moves to waive SCO's case? (Score:5, Informative)
Novell also retained the unusual right to require SCO to follow its directions to amend, supplement, modify or waive these licenses and, if SCO does not comply, Novell can do so on SCO's behalf.
Re:WTF: Novell moves to waive SCO's case? (Score:5, Interesting)
The short answer, no.
The SCO Group has dug themselves into a rather large litigation hole that surpasses what it would cost to purchase the entire company. They owe something like $20 million to Novell in royalties, Red Hat has a lawsuit which TSCOG will likely lose now that its become obvious to the court that they had been lying all along, and there is the potential of investor lawsuits due to the run up in the stock price to over $20 dollars a share and the eventual collapse as everyone realized they were lying about their evidence.
So you see it would be foolish for IBM to purchase TSCOG at this point because of the huge financial risk now hanging over them.
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IBM doesn't want to invite suit-as-exit-strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Doing so would invite thousands of nuisance suits from people who want to be bought off by being bought out. Suing IBM would become both a neat way to make a few million bucks and an exit strategy for every failing company that could make a vuagely-plausible argument that IBM had something to do with their fall.
So instead IBM has chosen to counter-attack, sucking all the blood out of SCO and leaving a dessicated corpse hanging on a spike for all to see.
It's an object lesson on the pitfalls of trying extortion on Big Blue.
They have had this policy for a while. SCO is just the biggest band of fools-or-crooks to come along in a long time, trying something new with ramifications in one of the biggest-bucks fights in a long time: the war between Microsoft and Open Source. So SCO gets the biggest spotlight.
Re:Get over it, there is no fucking war. (Score:5, Interesting)
Gates said: "control the standard" (Score:3, Insightful)
If ODF caught on, msft might lose control of the document standard. Nearly msft's worst nightmare. Consider msft's aggressive lobbying in MA.
Re:Get over it, there is no fucking war. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:WTF: Novell moves to waive SCO's case? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WTF: Novell moves to waive SCO's case? (Score:5, Informative)
SCO are trying to assert legal ownership of key IP in the Linux system, and in Linux as a whole. They're sued IBM as a way of establishing this right, and for their pains they are currently being slowly flayed by IBM in the courts.
Novell bought SUSE, one of the big commercial distros. If SCO succeed in their suit, Novell has to buy a licence from SCO or stop distributing Linux. Additionally, Novell reckon that if there is any proprietary IP in Linux, they've got a better claim to it than SCO, and they can prove it. So in the case of SCO, Novell are on our side.
At the same time, Novell have entered into a deal with Microsoft. Most of it seems to be smoke and mirrors, but what it appears to boil down to is that in return for Novell paying a royalty to MS, MS will help their competitive position with respect to the other distros by threatening to sue rival distributors, developers... almost anybody really. Even SUSE users aren't safe, since MS can cancel the agreement with anyone, any time and for any reason. So it's pretty much a promise not to sue unless they really feel like it. Reassuring, huh? Novell also agreed not to use their patent arsenal to defend Linux against MS, and in return, they get a big pot of cash.
In this case, it's rather harder to approve of Novell's actions. The deal may not have any legal implications for linux users anywhere, but the patent agreement is going back on a promise they made earlier to the Linux community. On top of that, it's just not a friendly act towards the rest of the community. Other objections have been raised, such attempting to circumvent the PLL, but I can't see how that works, and neither can Mogen Eblen, so I think the whole thing's a combination marketing-and-barratry-deal.
There are some reservations still as to what else may have been agreed upon. A lot of people are concerned that Novell may try and inject code that clearly violate MS patents into one or more open source packages. Mono and the new OpenOffice fork are particularly worrying in that regard.
So to sum up:
Bad Guys:Microsoft, SCO.
Self-Serving Opportunists:Novell
Good Guys:Linux devs, distributors other than Novell and SCO, users
Caught In The Crossfire:SUSE devs
Hope that helps. Have a nice day.
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I tend to agree. If they thought they could win, I rather think they'd be doing it, rather than just FUDding about it.
And that's almost certainly a big part of the plan. The trouble is, I don't think Redmond strategists do single objective plans. Consider SCO. That had as a prime objective getting all the right
Why IBM won't buy SCO (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay I just don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
I use Ubuntu, why should this matter to me? If the Ubuntu folks don't like what Novell is doing can't they just ignore whatever Novell is doing?
Everyone is acting like this is the end of Linux as we know it. Honestly could someone explain why this is?
Re:Okay I just don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
MS is probably never going to come after you for license money. But they might go after big companies that support linux -- IBM, RedHat, etc. And they might scare large enterprise customers away from linux.
If these things happen, your free ubuntu starts to wither and die. All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drivers you need, the fancy new desktop software, etc.
Linux is an ecosystem, and all of the parts need to be healthy in order for it to continue. While this situation doesn't threaten you personally, it does effect other vital members of our ecosystem, and if they go down, we're all going to be a lot worse off over the long run,
All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drivers (Score:4, Funny)
Re:All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drive (Score:5, Informative)
The other key highlight of this talk was:
Closed source Linux kernel modules are illegal.
Closed source Linux kernel modules are unworkable.
Closed source Linux kernel modules are unethical.
So who the hell is this guy? He's Greg Kroah-Hartman. Who the hell is that? He's a kernel developer. His name appears 149 times in my kernel sources (Ubuntu patched, 2.6.15). And, perhaps more tellingly it appears at the top of the files:
drivers/pci/pci-sysfs.c and
drivers/pci/search.c
both of which contain many functions which are called from functions in this file:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8776-pkg1/usr/src/nv/os-inte
What's that? It's wrapper for the closed source NVIDIA kernel module. What license is that under? The NVIDIA Software License [nvidia.com]. It's basically a proprietary EULA with a redistribution (without modification) exception for distros. It sure aint the GPL, or "as free" as the GPL (which is techically what the GPL requires for derived works).
So Greg.. why don't you sue them? You've made your position clear, fight them. If you havn't got the money, contact the FSF, assign your copyright to them, get them to fight. Given the choice between opening their source code or not being able to distribute their software at all, NVIDIA will choose to open their source code. How can I be so sure? Cause people buy their chipsets to integrate into things like set top boxes and other devices that run Linux. They need that embedded market, that's why they released the drivers in the first place. The problem is that no-one is making them choose.
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Re:All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drive (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, Nvidia distributes two works they present as separate. A binary blob, and a 'shim' under the GPL, whose only purpose is to load their blob and link it into the kernel.
Also, Nvidia doesn't distribute the kernel.
So, while it's clearly illegal to distribute a working system using this two-part driver as part of the linux kernel, it's not quite clearly illegal to distribute just those two parts without the kernel, which is what Nvidia does.
They're exploiting a loophole in the GPL, and unfortunately, while I believe a court would probably rule against them in the end, once the entire situation was clearly explained, this would be an incredibly expensive proposition.
Suing distro makers that bundle the kernel, shim, and blob together in a usable form would be much easier, but you know what? No one really wants to sue a distro maker for trying to make their customers lives easier. That's a last resort, only if and when it becomes clear that simply talking to them won't do the trick. And that's how it should be. We're a community, and we don't and shouldn't jump to sue each other unless and until everything else has been tried and failed.
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NVIDIA just wants to protect its right to conceal its chip architecture from its compet
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Re:All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drive (Score:4, Insightful)
There is substantial reason to believe that kernel modules are not derived works of the kernel if they use the standard published kernel APIs, just as normal userland programs are not considered derivative works of the standard system header files and libraries, even if the userland program #include's or links against libc.so.
It's also true that the Linux kernel includes a fair amount of BSD-licensed source code, so it's obviously not true that all Linux kernel modules need to be under the GPL to be redistributed. A quick check against the Linux-2.6.0 kernel suggests 274 examples:
% find linux-2.6.0 -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l 'Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without' | wc -l
274
These files start with linux-2.6.0/arch/m68k/mac/iop.c, include the ACPI & scsi/aic7xxx drivers, NFSd (linux-2.6.0/fs/nfs/idmap.c) & SunRPC (linux-2.6.0/net/sunrpc/auth_gss/auth_gss.c), and others.
1. are distributing a derived work
While Eben Moglen may have other opinions, most people on the OSI mailing lists did not consider the nVidia driver to be a derived work of the Linux kernel.
2. is bound by the license on the kernel if they are not distributing the kernel
The answer to this is obviously no.
3. is satisfying the terms of the GPL by distributing partial source code to their driver
The answer to this is obviously no, but the nVidia driver isn't and never has been under the terms of the GPL, because nVidia wrote it themselves.
4. would only be violating copyright if they were distributing binaries with no source code wrapper
The answer to this is "probably no", going by the "published API"s standard I mentioned above for deciding whether source code constitutes a derivative work or not.
5. are guilty of contributory copyright infringement by facilitating others to distribute binaries if 4 were the case
This suggestion comes straight from Eben Moglen, and is unlikely to gain much traction in a court of law. (a) nVidia has done nothing to encourage people to redistribute a Linux kernel plus the proprietary nVidia driver. (b) nVidia releasing a free (as in "no cost to download") driver for someone to use their nVidia video card with Linux would almost certainly qualify as "fair use" and be protected under 17 USC 107.
And if not, just who would you sue? Linux users who want GLX hardware acceleration?
SCO sued it's userbase, and look how far that got them...
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Fair use is another section of the copyright law, which says you can use copyrighted material for free and without requiring permission in certain cases: teaching, news, criticism, review, research etc.
(Just putting things in place. A lo
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In my opinion, this attitude is a perversion of the ideals behind the creation of the GPL. The purpose of the license, as I understand it, wasn't to ensure that an army of paid developers were incessently toiling away to provide you with free software, it was to ensure that when said army disappeared, you had the source code and weren't left with unmaintainable binaries. There appears to be this persistent assumption that GPL == evil multina
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Noone has given me a single reason why this deal is bad
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Whether you believe it or not, the future quality of Linux is related to -- although not completely dependent upon -- its popularity.
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Microsoft can now spread more FUD about their IP being in Linux, and they can point to this agreement with a major Linux vendor as proof. After all, if these claims were untrue, why would company as knowledgeable as Novell about Linux pay money for indemnification against them?
That may well turn off some large companies from using Linux. And Novell allows Microsoft to do this, they even agreed to help spreading this FUD themselves too, and all of it without Microsoft having to provide any specifics at all
Re:Okay I just don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Okay I just don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Or maybe Novell just wanted a couple hundred million George Washingtons.
Because one of four things I can think of is going on:
1. Novell just thought that the partnership would be good (remember, something like $300 mil) completely unrelated to IP issues
2. Novell's lawyers think there ARE IP issues with Linux, and they plan on dropping distribution of Linux when
They didn't make that promise, either (Score:3, Interesting)
As you can plainly see, at any time it wishes Microsoft is free to "discontinue" the conv
Re:Okay I just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Not because they are pussies (Score:5, Insightful)
What I do expect will happen, at some point, is someone with standing to sue will initiate a dialogue with them, and they'll remove the drivers. I don't think anyone is in a huge hurry about that, however, for the reasons outlined above.
Re:Not because they are pussies (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me? They're taking stuff that the relevant kernel developers have clearly said is illegal, unworkable and unethical and they're distributing it. They should be shunning these drivers, not proping them up.
And as long as they aren't actually distributing code, they can get away with it.
The only reason they're getting away with it is because the relevant kernel developers are not suing them.
What I do expect will happen, at some point, is someone with standing to sue will initiate a dialogue with them, and they'll remove the drivers.
I dont think that's going to happen. I think we're going to learn to live with it. Then the next time some hardware company sees an advantage in making a closed source driver for Linux, they'll point at the NVIDIA drivers and say "well, they're ok, so we'll be ok." And ya know what? They will be. Then everything will fall apart.
If you don't care about your freedom, you'll lose it.
I'd love to do something about this. I have some ideas about what I could do about this. Maybe some people would like to help me [mailto], but the people who are in the best position to do something about this are Greg Kroah-Hartman, Martin Mares, avid Mosberger-Tang, Frederic Potter and Drew Eckhardt. They wrote the code that NVIDIA is illegally linking to. They put that code under the GPL. Was there a point to that?
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And as long as they aren't actually distributing code, they can get away with it.
You misinterpreted the word they in that sentence, and I confess I should have written that more clearly and I inadvertently encouraged your confusion. The they above is Nvidia and co, not Ubuntu.
Look, here's how I see it, and I suspect how the kernel devs may well see it. Nvidia has found a loophole to exploit. Nvid
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It's clear that a binary compiled against Linux kernel headers is a derivative work of those headers, but it's not clear that the source code itself is a derivative work. Otherwise, I completely agree. Great post.
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but they obey their obligations on the shim.
Ok, I'm gunna have to stop you right there. They don't obey their obligations on the shim. Specifically the shim (which I call, the wrapper) is not under the GPL, and the GPL clearly states that You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. Game Over.
The binary blob, as you call it, specifically, nv-kernel.o or "the r
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I apologise if my information is incorrect. I thought it was.
I care very much about that, actually. And I don't think I've said anything from which you could reasonably infer otherwise.
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I care very much about that, actually. And I don't think I've said anything from which you could reasonably infer otherwise.
Sorry, I'll try to keep better track of who I'm replying to.
I almost agree with you. Show me a good shot at Nvidia and I'll take it.
Are you in a position to do that?
But suing them for what they're doing now would, I think, be extremely expensive first off. Because, unlike the cases that have been prosecuted so far, this is not a clear, undeniable violation.
Ok, first off, this is the case the FSF has to have. They need to prosecute this and they need to win. Cause if what they are doing is legal, then the GPL is broken a lot more than we thought.
Secondly, I don't think it is all that complicated. Even if you wanna debate the whole derived work and not distributing linux thing, some people are distributing linux and this module. Surely we can agree that they are
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The binary blob, as you call it, specifically, nv-kernel.o or "the resource manager" as the wrapper calls it, is a derivative work of the wrapper, and is therefore also required to be under the GPL, and so on. This is classic "how do I make proprietary modifications to a GPL program?" nonsense. Anyone who distributes this stuff is guilty of contributory copyright infringement.
Correct -- and therefore NVidia does not distribute nv-kernel.o. They cause it to be compiled on the user's machine. Few users w
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For the sake of argument, consider the other side of the equation. By allowing Nvidia to develop drivers the way that they want to develop drivers, Nvidia will make their hardware available to the Linux community. ATI will follow suit. Before you know it, the next generation of games that would have been limited to Windows are all of a sudden available to various Linux distros because the videocard vendors have written drivers that will render the gra
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Testosterware? (Score:2)
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Actually, his statement is not entirely wrong here. In the legal since, they may not be violating a copyright because they can be invalidated in court. It is not like copyright where it is relatively cut and dry, until fair-use comes into play. Patents are currently an icky mess, and I think a big reason you do not see these lawsuits against Linux with all these patents is because they know their
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In regards to proprietary graphics drivers. They are proprietary because we tolerate them. If the day NVIDIA had released those drivers the kernel developers had asked the FSF to send a cease and desist to NVIDIA, we probably would hav
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Don't leave GNOME, follow GPL3 (Score:3)
Perhaps you are referring in part to Miguel de Icaza, who was among the founders of both GNOME (in 1997) and Ximian (in 1999), and is very positive about the Novell-Microsoft deal (which got him a lot of ill-will recently), but naturally other Ximian
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"Linux sucks, but Suse rocks" - Joe Sixpack.
Re:Okay I just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst case scenario would be Microsoft using their patent portfolio in an attempt to shutdown any open source projects which infringe their IP. Your Ubuntu is based off many many open source projects and the loss of many of those projects could be detrimental to the capability of your favorite distro.
Now obviously its much more complicated than that but you asked for some simple terms and how they would effect you so there ya go.
Poisoning the Water Hole (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Poisoning the Water Hole (Score:4, Interesting)
It does nothing of the sort. Novell programmers can't legally do this, have no reason to do this, and have absolutely no obligation to do this under the agreement. As I've said before, compatibility can either be achieved without violating patents or it can't. This agreement doesn't change the patent facts (whatever they are). It merely states that the two companies won't sue each other's customers for patent violation, that's all.
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FUD for who? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, it has induced REAL fear, REAL uncertainty and REAL doubt in Novell SUSE. Up until this incident started, I had pretty much decided that SUSE would be the distribution we would base all our new web/db/mail servers on owing to its combination of corporate support and ease of use.
Now I'm back on the fence considering Red Hat or another distro.
Unfortunately, I think SUSE inadvertently screwed themselves. In this regard, I have to say that Red Hat is doing an awesome job. They have deliberately tried to meet the Linux "community standards" while still being commercial. If only they were more open with their non-Fedora distributions, we would have probably standardized on Red Hat from the start.
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Now I'm back on the fence considering Red Hat or another distro.
So how did the corporate support and ease of use change? If you don't feel any FUD, then SUSE should be just as viable as before. Or is this just FUD of a different color?
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Actually I don't believe him turning away from SUSE would be FUD. Even if you ignore the fact that
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If you have no customers but do have a large community, then it might be easy to quickly gain lots of customers.
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Hold on there. Redhat has been nothing but open. In fact, nearly all distros can be traced back to redhat (of course, the floppies => yggdrasil => slackware, which all came before redhat).
Redhat has had only 2 issues that kept them from being the standard. The first and major
blah blah (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:blah blah (Score:5, Informative)
So basically anyone who purchases Novell's Open Platform Solutions is also paying a Microsoft tax, as Novell's new partner Steve Balmer noted, "because open-source Linux does not come from a company -- Linux comes from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders" and Steve expects to be paid.
No mitigation of infringement, no proof of infringement, no analysis of the patents to even verify if Microsoft actual has valid IP. Nope, but Novell does us all a favor and bypasses all that boring routine. Thanks but no thanks.
That is easy to imagine, linux would be where OS/2 is. That's how Microsoft cooperates.
I look at where linux is today and I don't think it needs anything from Microsoft.
Just wondering (possibly O/T) ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just wondering
Re:Just wondering (possibly O/T) ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just wondering (possibly O/T) ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be somewhat of a pain to change, but if he wanted to do it he could definitely do it.
Sometimes (Score:3, Insightful)
As I said, I don't have a problem with enthusiasm - others may feel different, because lots of peeps consider the display of emotions or enthusiasm as weakness, and they invest a lot of emotions in pretending to not care or feel something about these issues. But except for this last case, you will hardly find any criticism of groklaw and PJ that tries to address the issues she raises with logical arguments. I haven't followed the happening on groklaw in the past few years to closely, but since hell broke out about the Novell-MS deal, I have been regularly reading groklaw, and I have to say this: the oo.o fork article was not a trend, but an exception. PJ is still the same PJ I have come to know when the SCO case started: exceptionally thorough and logical in providing arguments to prove her point, but also a bit emotional and enthusiastic (which made some of her writings an easy target for those, who failing provide rational arguments concerning the points she made, dismissed her articles on the note of being "biased".)
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And it is full of grammatical errors too - a shame (even though english is not my native language)! But thanks for the heads-up, this one I haven't noticed. Dotslash comes more naturally when abbreviated, probably because of ./configuring ./running_scripts, etc. :))
The deal (Score:3, Informative)
Bottom line I work for pointy haired bosses but they will not under any circumstances question what distro I run in the enterprise...novell put that in your pipe and smoke it. EV1 learned a valuable lesson and Novell should have taken note of what happens when you try to bend the rules.
Well, one thing is for sure (Score:2)
At least Microsoft can't claim they're not involved in this anymore, like back when they were piping money through Baystar to fund this fiasco.
Eban Moglen is our general now (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing I've taken away from the Novell/MS deal, though, is that this stuff is really complicated, and it's really dangerous. I'll be honest -- I don't understand all of the implications of the deal, or why each of the two parties decided to do it. But I feel like something's going on -- like I'm playing 3 card monte on the street or something.
I don't think that non-specialists (ie., geeks who don't think much about law) are in a good position to know what's best.
Novell, and the guys that came to Novell when they bought Ximian and SUSE, have done an incredible amount of good for our community. We are, to a certain extent, depending on Novell's patents to protect us in this coming fight. I think they're good guys, doing what they feel they have to do in order to survive.
But even if this isn't nefarious, it's made us realize that we'd be open to something similar that was nefarious. Those crazy freedom guys weren't so crazy after all.
So I think we have to trust the people who understand these treacherous waters the best -- I think that's Eban Moglen. He says that GPL3 is necessary to counter this threat, and he says it will be effective, even if the kernel remains under GPL2. The toolchain will be enough to do what we need.
I don't want to demonize Novell, because they've given me a lot of great code, and because there are people there who are real heroes to our community. I think they're mistaken, and I think Linus is mistaken to stick with GPL2. It just ain't viral enough to keep us safe.
But instead of attacking people, or getting hysterical, I think the thing to do is to listen to our best legal minds, and back GPL3. So my feeling is that Linus's honor is beyond question, he's obviously a lot smarter than I am, and he might even be smarter than Eban Moglen. But when it comes to law, I'm going to listen to Moglen.
And I would say that the Ximian guys' honor is beyond question, and that they're a lot smarter than I am as well. But I'm still going to listen to Moglen about the law.
Again, my feeling is that we shouldn't let this break down cooperation, we shouldn't let it affect the civility of our community, and we shouldn't attribute bad motives to anyone. But we should play it safe, and innoculate with GPL3.
Re:Eban Moglen is our general now (Score:5, Insightful)
He played this game for much longer than most of us.
Is he a wee bit extreme ? Yes.
But without that single-minded focus he couldn't have pulled it off for the first 10+ years when he was practically alone.
I would trust him with my life, nevermind GPLv3.
Re:Eban Moglen is our general now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Eban Moglen is our general now (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a CS major. Now I'm finally graduating with a BA in history and applying to law school. I want to focus on IP law to help in the fight against the proprietary giants.
I began studying CS in '99 because I like computers and wanted to make a lotta $$. After working in the "industry" full time for a couple of years, and going to college for 6+ years, I've finally decided to do something that makes me feel good. Just thinking about using my talents to further a good cause gives me the chills, in a good way. Hopefully I will be reporting to guys like Moglen in a few years, J.D. in hand. Fuck the money.
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Nice analogy.
Scenario: Three card monte. (Microsoft / Novell agreement)
Setting: Dark alley. Famous in Mexico city. (Legal conversations held behind closed doors)
Players: The dealer. Random passers-by who are "just normal people". Someone acting as a lookout for the police. (Microsoft - has a history of extinguishing "partners." Novell - a contributing member of the open source community. Lookout? I'm su
Let me see if I have this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I can't read the terms, because it's a secret. And they don't agree in public on what, exactly, the deal was.
Boy, am I relieved!
But where's the explanation? (Score:2)
Imagine that I have a Slackware system. (I do, even.) How is this system affected by any deal Novell signs?
I don't see how this can be connected, and since TFA doesn't describe in any real detail what the Novell agreement says, or how it has any effect on anyone other than Novell or Microsoft, there's not much point in just asserting that it's bad.
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Right or wrong, Microsoft own patents which code in Linux voilates. It wasn't knowningly put there, it was written by programmers who didn't know they were doing wrong. This code is in slack as well, and the MS-Novel agreement implies that somebody other than Novell is going to get sued.
TFA is pointless and says nothing (Score:2)
Well, OK, it says "The Novell deal was really bad, really really bad. It's good for Microsoft. What SCO is doing is good for Microsoft. The Novell deal is like the SCO deal because they are both good for Microsoft. The Novell deal is really stupid and Novell should know better."
And while I agree, nobody is going to be convinced by that. I would appreciate some deeper level of analysis and explanation. Perhaps something I could use when talking to people about it about why the deal is a bad idea.
Poor Novell (Score:3, Interesting)
First, they did not do much to improve Yast2 on speed, bugs and the way it handles dependencies. This alone, made me avoid its Linux products.
Now comes this Microsoft deal. With this deal, I will not even touch its Linux products even with a 10 foot long pole!
Sadly, those who predicted that Novell will do nothing good for SuSE after buying it, (just like Word Perfect), are being proven right.
When all you have... (Score:2)
Conspiracists believe that all evil is attributable to one cause. Communist Insiders, The Elders of Zion, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Microsoft. But that's not reality. PJ needs to wake up and realize that SCO is able to be evil all on its own.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1) At the outset of the lawsuit, Microsoft paid SCO $10 million in "license fees", that were, apparently, illegally kept by SCO rather than passed on to Novell. A few years back Santa Cruz actually had to pay Microsoft for the rights to distribute Unix, now Microsoft has somehow decided it needs to pay SCO for something Unixy.
2)Microsoft then convinced Baystar, an investment management firm, to invest another $50 million or so, by saying 'if you start to lose money, we'll cover your loss' (
Re:When all you have... (Score:4, Informative)
1) SCO is suing IBM because SCO believes SCO copyrighted code is in the Linux kernel.
2) Microsoft and Novell signed an indemnity agreement regarding patents.
3) There is no relation between the two. SCO isn't suing IBM over Microsoft patents, and Microsoft isn't indemnifying Novell's customers regarding SCO's copyrights. These are two seperate issues, and trying to conflate them is evidence only that your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For starters, even SCO believes there is hardly any SCO copyrighted code in the Linux kernel (at MOST, we're talking about 326 lines in Linux, here). SCO is suing over IBM copyrighted code in the Linux kernel. Really.
Secondly, I never said anything at all about the relationship between the Microsoft/Novell deal and the SCO/Linux lawsuit. Your initial post seemed to deny ANY link between Microsoft and SCO, and I felt the need to correct you on that howler.
In my
GPLv3 (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of whether this article has any substance or is merely a frothing rant on PJ's part, I think (inadvertently?) she's overestimating the adoption rate of GPLv3.
Linus has clearly stated that he intends to keep the kernel under v2, and most of the larger projects have yet to make any meaningful statement about it.
Never mind the scores of smaller projects that don't have the resources or prowess to make an informed descision about which GPL version to use; most of them will stick with v2. I wouldn't be surprised if most projects simply followed Linus' example.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The entire GNU toolchain will move to GPLv3, as well as all of the other software owned by the Free Software Foundation. That, you can definitely count on. Other software that depends on this vast base of software, much of which is fundamental to the operation of any GNU/Linux system, will probably be encouraged to switch with time. Uninformed projects probably are also uninformed enough to use the FSF's original statement of the GPLv2, which contains the 'later version' clause that the Linux kernel lack
Redundant Answer (Score:2)
The real problem is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Embrace, extend, exterminate (Score:4, Insightful)
MS signs patent agreement with Novel.
Novel introduce MS patent based technologies (WMV, DRM, interoperability stuff, etc) into their variant of Linux (while also keeping up to date with the kernel release, etc, done by the community).
People deciding which Linux to use have a choice between the souped-up version from Novel which will do lots of Windows stuff or regular Linux.
Regular Linux can't take the MS stuff into itself because it's patented. The MS Linux can take all the regular Linux stuff because it's GPL.
Result? MS start to get significant leverage over Linux by proxy, by trying to dominate the Linux variant market with "their" (e.g. Novell's) variant. MS would do this itself I think, without going through Novell, if they had the linux know-how.
MS then start putting seriously nice stuff into MS Linux, more and more people start to use it, become dependent on it, MS start making it easy to migrate from MS Linux to Windows, etc, etc - all sorts of strategies are available at that point.
I can see why a modified GPL is needed now, to exclude patented material from the kernel; this is to protect Linux from MS's embrace/extend/exterminate policy.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)