novell die-off imminent? [LWN.net]

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 18:14 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)
Parent article: On Novell and Microsoft

the only audience i presume this placates is the corporate audience who
purchase site liceses, where novell already occupies a minority position.
redhat's immediate response was correct, and i suspect they will have no
problem maintaining market dominance among corporate buyers.

opensuse community contributors are probably feeling a little burned, going
to the same shrink that is currently treating former darwinx86 community
contributors. at this rate i wonder why community contributors bother with
corporate products at all.

pursuant to this, i predict a suse die-off. i'll be scanning distrowatch
for clues.

the real kicker is miguel's snotty comment that this addresses mono patent
issues, which he claims are the exclusive domain of people who "find dates
on slashdot". well miguel, if their concerns are so ridiculous, why did you
validate them? your comment derinding people who show interest and concern
for software freedom really amazed me, and i have moved you to the
shitlist.

this really calls into question mono integration with gnome. i personally
will not run gnome at this point if i am forced into a corner with novell
and microsoft.

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novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 18:59 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I totally agree. Miguel has been saying for years that patents are simply not a problem for Mono. Then yesterday he blogs about how NOW patents are not a problem for Mono.

Um, what? Are patents a problem or not?

Up until last week I was OK with running Mono. Now Miguel is making it pretty clear that, unless you're under Novell's protective umbrella, Mono carries some real risks. Otherwise why would this pact even matter?

I purged Mono from my machines yesterday. Now that Tracker is pretty strong, no big loss (I only used Beagle as locate++ anyway). I just need to figure out another way to package up FCKeditor's javascript source files now...

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 19:45 UTC (Tue) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link]

What has FCKeditor's javascript got to do with Mono? I'm just curious - I hack on it myself as part of my living... Thx!

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 8, 2006 5:52 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

The packager is written in C#.

http://events.uvic.ca/scripts/editor/_packager/readme.html
http://www.fckeditor.net/packager/

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 21:35 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Patents are a problem for ALL Free software.

With Mono your going to be relatively safe. Just don't use any of the parts of Mono that aren't C# proper.

The thing is that it's a published standard, put out by Microsoft, for other people to use. If they were to all of a sudden go after patent infrigments they would have to explain why the hell they disclosed all this information on C# and all of a sudden decided to sue people when they made no mention of any patents before this.

Other companies that disclose patent-encumbered "standards", like Cicso and their networking stuff, always declare what patents they care about and were you can go to pay the licensing fees.

So using Mono is safer then:
Mono is safer then OpenOffice.org
Mono is safer then Koffice
Mono is safer then Firefox
Mono is safer then QT
Mono is safer then the Linux kernel
Mono is safer then Samba

So you better strip all those things out of your distribution.

Because undoubtedly those are violating somebody's patents somewere and the likelihood that one of multiple of them could be owned by Microsoft is pretty high. And with those, especially with anything that deals with Windows file and protocol compatability, was made in a way that was entirely unnaproved by Microsoft and does things that they very much dislike.

Saying we should avoid mono because of possible patents owned by Microsoft is like saying "I should cut off my thumb becuase it might have cancer in it"

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 23:20 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

After having seen "than" misspelled as "then" in six sentences in a row, I went berserk and uninstalled mono on all machines where I have root access. Poor beagle and tomboy - they were killed too as collateral damage.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 23:28 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Your loss then.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 8, 2006 2:11 UTC (Wed) by avik (subscriber, #704) [Link]

You mean than.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 8, 2006 7:16 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Just FYI, patents are by definition publicly disclosed, and there is no obligation to not include them in standards. What is considered unfair is making something a standard while secretly pursuing patent protection, only to spring it later when it is too late to stop using the standard. Illegal? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what kind of agreements were in place when the company joined the standards body.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 9, 2006 9:53 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ya the patent is still valid if you do it, but you can't do things like sue for damages.

Sure the patents are disclosed, but the pratical limitations for programmers to understand patents of find the violating patent out of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousand other software patents is very unlikely.

The Laches defense kicks in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_%28equity%29

And if I understand with patents you still keep it, but you loose a lot of rights. Generally what you could expect to happen is that if Microsoft decided to sue Mono developers then the court would eventually just give Mono developers a period of time to correct the patent violations or start paying licensing fees.

Microsoft won't be able to claim that Mono was hiding stuff from them or whatnot. Mono is very open with Microsoft and do presentations in .NET confrences and that sort of thing.

Also mono is partially attempting to promote C# by making it cross-platform. So in effect it's kinda benifiting Microsoft.

Now in comparision look at Samba. This has definately damaged Microsoft's market share. Plenty of Linux boxes running samba have saved many many people the cost of paying Microsoft. Microsoft refuses to release documentation based on 'IP' issues, and has no interest in interlopy with other systems. Their versions of SMB were never intended to work with anything but Microsoft software.

So with SMB2 with Vista and such Linux has support for that BEFORE Vista even gets released to the public. So this stuff has been reversed engineered from software provided for Microsoft associated developers. I am sure that in the legal agreements and EULA hell associated with MS beta programs probably forbid stuff like that.

So the likelyhood of Microsoft actually inflicting serious damage into Samba through a patent violation is much much higher then with Mono.

Of course I will happily use Samba. I am not scared of potential patent lawsuites. If Microsoft starts throwing around the patent nulcear bomb it's going to be the business equivelent of WW3. A feeding frenzy. It's just as likely that MS will end up dead as much as any other company. Free software and Linux is going to survive no matter what the hell happens. It's a bit like coachroaches in this manner.

(and despite my psuedo-defending Mono and Novell, my personal preference is Python and Debian)

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 16, 2006 12:49 UTC (Thu) by gwg (guest, #20811) [Link]

> So this stuff has been reversed engineered from software provided for
> Microsoft associated developers. I am sure that in the legal agreements
> and EULA hell associated with MS beta programs probably forbid stuff like that.

Probably, but (as far as I can tell) it doesn't apply, because Samba is being done in Australia, and the Copyright Amendment (Computer Programs) Bill 1999 exempts people from such EULA terms, if the reverse engineering is for the purpose of study, security or software compatibility.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 19:06 UTC (Tue) by N0NB (subscriber, #3407) [Link]

Isn't it interesting that GNOME, the prefered GNU project DE, is now suffering by guilt from association with Ximian and Novell?

it is not

Posted Nov 7, 2006 19:57 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Novell/SuSE has many important contributors to both Gnome and KDE, but since the Ximian folks went heavily for Mono, they are no longer in the mainstream of Gnome development (and I think that the other Gnome developers will be much more reluctant to work with Mono than before). There isn't any reason for you to start a Gnome/KDE flamewar, so please don't.

it is

Posted Nov 7, 2006 22:22 UTC (Tue) by N0NB (subscriber, #3407) [Link]

No flame war intended. Just pointing out that I've read some negative knee-jerk reaction toward GNOME over the past few days and that some people quickly establish guilt by association. That is all.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 20:17 UTC (Tue) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link]

Though the way you phrased it is a tad coarse for LWN I feel it is true that there had been some concerns about Mono and patents. It does seem that Novell were saying "oh no - it's all right, Mono is _fine_" while everybody else was going "um, this _the_ Microsoft we're talking about here". When Fedora gave Mono the green light I think most of us relaxed but now Novell seems to be saying "Mono is covered (now)" which if correct sucks either way.

I think it should be recognised by distribution creators that .Net and Java are really MS and Sun vehicles and that the less we rely on them the better. Sure there's some cool Mono and Java apps (Beagle, Tomboy, Eclipse, Limewire) but languages/platforms should be completely company agnostic. Who owns C? Who owns Python? I feel we all do in a communal kind of way. But when it comes to Mono/.Net and Java you know for sure all roads lead back to Redmond and Menlo Park. We should tread carefully. I wonder how easy it would be to make a version of Ubuntu without Mono and Java?

I know there are more imporatant things in life :)
Anthony

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 21:20 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

well in a way if this was to come to a head, maybe now is the time for it to happen, before mono becomes deeply integrated into popular distributions.

as of now, purging mono and living without it appears to be relatively painless, and once again this validates the open source ecosystem of tools as compared to monoculture (pun intended!).

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 22:28 UTC (Tue) by N0NB (subscriber, #3407) [Link]

So far as I know, living without mono is quite painless as I don't have it installed anywhere. Java is another story as several apps depend on having it available although Debian does stay away from Sun's version. Worse is Flash which has no real work-alike available. I hold it in disdain, but keep it installed for the odd webpage that uses it which is generally for entertainment purposes and could probably be excised without too much pain. NoScript helps with that a lot.

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 8, 2006 8:11 UTC (Wed) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

I don't see the connection from gnome to mono.
Just dont install the very few mono applications. Your choice :)