Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

Posted Oct 26, 2005 8:20 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek) by cdmiller
Parent article: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

I can't know, but I wouldn't be suprised if they CAN'T release NDS and their Groupware software as open source software.

When doing big software developement it's pretty much a given that your going to buy software and farm out parts of the developement to other companies. Why rewrite from scratch when the part you need is already built and you can just buy it?

Well the nature of closed source cross licensing scemes can hurt businesses that sell software as much as it can hurt customers that get locked in to a closed source product unwittedly.

For example. (for a moment completely forget the much more recent Linux vs SCO stuff) Take a old case of SCO vs Microsoft.

So you get this.. AT&T had their Unix. They couldn't sell computers themselves due to their monopolistic standing (court orders).

So AT&T licensed code to other companies that would develop it and sell it for their computers. This is what Microsoft did.. they licensed code for their unix system, Xenix, and hired SCO to develop it.

Microsoft eventually licensed code back to AT&T in order to make sure that future PC versions of unix would be compatable with Xenix stuff. AT&T used the code to ensure compatability and paid royalties to Microsoft.

Novell eventually bought the Unix code, sued some people, ruined BSD unix, and inherited the licensing agreement with the xenix code and Microsoft.

Eventually Novell sold the rights (more or less) to that stuff to SCO which went on to successfully build Unix systems for the x86 platform for many years. Of course by this time all that Xenix stuff was completely obsolete and Microsoft released NT which was hoped by many people to be the 'unix killer'.

So here you have two competing companies selling operating systems aimed for the same market on the same hardwawre platform. The only snag was that one was forced to maintain obsolete code by ancient AT&T agreement and not only that they had to pay their direct competators for the pleasure.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/tale.shtml

I think that there is crap like that all going on all the time, especially with old code bases like what Novell has for NDS and Groupware stuff. Who knows how many dozens cross licensing agreements they have with companies. Who have they sold code to, who have they licensed code from.

I think that it's pretty likely that Novell CAN'T open source their own software even if they wanted to (which I have no idea of).

Still though as far as new projects Novell has contributed a lot. Go look at mono, look at evolution email client, X.org development, and gnome desktop development.

For groupware-like stuff they've released Hula as free software.

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