Novell is cowardly, not evil [LWN.net]

Novell is cowardly, not evil

Posted Dec 1, 2006 8:08 UTC (Fri) by robla (subscriber, #424)
In reply to: Please explain by BrucePerens
Parent article: Who is being divisive?

This situation is somewhat reminiscent of the old joke about the two campers and the bear. Novell isn't trying to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other Linux distributors. Yes, that means the odds for everyone else becoming bear food just went up a little bit. Novell's action is cowardly, but we should be worrying about the bear rather than the guy who got out while he could.

Novell is a publicly traded company trying to sustain a ~$1 billion/year business by revenue (much bigger than Red Hat). They fund a lot of free software development, and still do a lot of cool things that they don't really have to. They aren't perfect, but they've been pretty good citizens. I'm sure removing the line in "risks" section of their annual report about Microsoft suing them and their customers into oblivion seemed like it was worth quite a bit of money. Criticizing them for taking the easy way out this time is fair; demonizing them is not.

Bruce, you wrote: In summary, I sincerely believe that your ethical position really stinks. You should be out of there, Nat.

I think your attitude toward Nat stinks. You as much as anyone should know just how hard it is trying to get a large company to do the exact right thing all of the time working from the inside. Nat has done a fantastic job getting Novell to do the right thing more often than not, and I'm betting he's having all sorts of arguments with the other executives at Novell about how to do a better job. Knowing that he's paying attention to what you're saying, you should be giving him cogent arguments, not reinforcing the stereotype that all free software advocates are so dogmatic and inflexible that they'll never be pleased, and it's best to ignore them and focus on paying customers.

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Novell is unethical, which is evil in my book

Posted Dec 1, 2006 8:39 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

The part I can't excuse is the cheating of GPL programmers. As LWN subscriber "emk" explains here:

I release my work under the GPL for a reason, and I expect my license to be honored, and not treated as an obstacle for clever lawyers to work around. Regardless of what Microsoft does in the future, Novell has already sent me a very clear message: They're happy to make a buck off my work, but they can't be bothered to deal with me in good faith.

What Novell did is not missing "the exact right thing". It's a willful, knowing, explicit cheat of a large group of unpaid software contributors by a $1 Billion/year company. I do not believe there is any way to portray it as an ethical action. And Nat's tasked with being their apologist, which puts the ethical issue right in his lap.

The Novell cheat also strikes right to the heart of Free Software development. If it becomes commonplace that companies can disregard their covenants with developers and suffer no consequences, the vast majority of our developers, who desire sharing with rules rather than to make an outright gift, will not be motivated to share any more software.

I wonder if Microsoft realized that, and if this is really an attack on the viability of the GPL.

Bruce

No, just dumb

Posted Dec 1, 2006 9:25 UTC (Fri) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link]

Never attribute to malice that which can be more easily explained by stupidity. I'm guessing most of the executives didn't realize the gravity of what they did. And now that the deed is done, it's probably too late to undo it.

I'm not calling it "ethical". I called it "cowardly", and now I'm adding "stupid". And I suppose that you may have license to attack Nat after he laid into you about the OSRM thing. But there's no good reason to. For all we know, he's the voice of reason inside of Novell, and may figure out how to make Novell do the right thing.

Look at the steps

Posted Dec 1, 2006 9:53 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

Rob,

It's difficult to believe this is "just stupid" because of the steps involved. It does not seem possible that the agreement was initially drafted with the covenants and with no knowledge of GPL section 7, since the use of covenants would be needlessly overcomplicated for such circumstances.

Someone had to decide to engineer a loophole and thus cheat those developers. Both companies had to agree to implement the loophole for each other. Counsel had to understand that the loophole was outside of the spirit of the previous agreement with unpaid contributors. Management must have heard about that as part of their exercise of due diligence.

Remember when you had to make a pragmatic decision about Free Software at Real Media? I was fair to you. I don't lambaste a company if it's not warranted.

Bruce

Look at the steps

Posted Dec 7, 2006 9:56 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

I'm a bit confused with the official interpretation of section 7 of the GPL. The "patent license" there is an example. It's not that section 7 just talks about how patent licenses ought to be dealt with, it gives an example how legal issues ought to be dealt with - patent licenses (for example), convenants (not an example), whatever. Section 7 is just a clarification by example what the rest of the GPL means: You can't put other contracts in place which allows direct distribution, but would prohibit redistribution; whatever these contracts are.

So IMHO, a convenant not to sue might violate the GPL once one party does indeed sue someone else. The issue still is complicated, since patent holders have the right to discriminate. You can tolerate violations from party A, and sue party B over the patent, just because you don't like B's nose, annual turnovers, or whatever. Unlike violating copyright, violating patents is not a criminal offense.

BTW: By (non-commercially) producing software that's incorporated into SuSE, I'm covered by the MS-Novell deal. I didn't do anything to it, but the fact that I'm covered means that I would violate the GPL when I distribute my software. That would be ugly. Fact is: the patent law is a minefield.

No, just dumb

Posted Dec 2, 2006 0:02 UTC (Sat) by shieldsd (subscriber, #20198) [Link]

Hear, hear!

I've always felt that, to a first approximation, incompetence is a much more likely explanation of an unexpected act than malice.

As an example, the elaborate theories that people are proposing here -- to "explain" what MS and Novell are up to -- may say more about the intelligence of the proposers than the malice of the corporations.