Various responses to Microsoft/Novell

Don't forget Jeff Merkey's take:

Well,

It's official. Microsoft and Novell will now fork Linux.

"Microsoft gets to wear the white hat and look benevolent, which is not the way they're usually cast in the tableau."

-Laura DiDio

The GPL Preamble clearly states :-

Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

Section seven of the GPL license clearly states :-

7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

Novell does not hold all of the copyrights to the Linux Kernel,SAMBA or OpenOffice.org ( Novell uses and distributes the latter under the terms of the LGPL not SUN's commercial license ), and Novell cannot legally distribute those same GPL licensed products under any license but the GPL. Also any more restrictive terms is a clearly a violation of the GPL!

Both Novell and IBM, in their legal briefs in there cases against the SCO Group, have made it repeatedly clear that the more restrictive SCO IP EULA is a violation of the terms of GPL license. The same GPL license which Caldera, Old SCO and the SCO Group was granted the right to distributed the copyrighted products in the first place.

Novell is in no position to argue that it now has the right to grant it's customers exlusive rights to use the GPL'ed technology that infringes Microsoft's patents. That is a clear violation of section seven of the GPL.

A “covenant not to sue” is just another name for a "license"

For example : The Licensor is agreeing that it will not sue the Licensee for infringement of Licensor’s patent. Just changing the terms used for "Licensor" and "Licensee" does not change the fact that it is plainly clear that the agreement represents a license.

I'm sorry Novell, you have been screwed by Microsoft almost exactly the same way Sun was screwed by Microsoft, but will it take almost a year for you to realise it?

In exchange for that, Novell can assure their customers that they are safe from any action against them coming from Microsoft, which many customers will see as a Good Thing. This is a just covenant between Novell and Microsoft, with a personal promise not to sue, and has nothing to do adding or substracting conditions to the GPL; I'm sure that any of Novell's lawyers understands the GPL at least as well as any of us, and knows much better than risking their rights to the code trying to keep others from distributing the same works.

So, if I'm a large business and I buy SLED or SLES today, I know that I'm safe from Microsoft, because Microsoft has just promised so. If I buy the same stuff from Red Hat or Ubuntu, then I've got no promise, just as nobody had it last week.

And somebody has mentioned this above, and I couldn't agree more: by no means will Microsoft wield a software patent against a competitor until software patents are approved in Europe. Somehow I would like them to attack right now, because that would make software patents way more likely to be defeated here in the EC for good.

Q: Has anything changed about Red Hat's Open Source Assurance program?

A: While customers have long purchased with confidence from Red Hat, Red Hat will now provide indemnification as an additional protection in its Open Source Assurance program.

Q: What does the additional protection cover?

A: The indemnification further protects against intellectual property infringement claims.

Q: How do customers obtain additional information and sign up?

A: Further information about the program and how to enroll will be provided shortly on redhat.com.

"Such talks would be a good idea, Ballmer suggested, since now only Novell's SUSE Linux customers are the only Linux vendors that have any assurance that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement."

"The distributors of other versions of Linux cannot assure their customers that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement. "If a customer says, 'Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work?' Essentially, If you're using non-SUSE Linux, then I'd say the answer is yes," Ballmer said."

Did Novell open the box of Pandora? I guess that we'll see.

Novelle have been nothing but bad news from day1 now they are selling out to that twat gates and his bunch of W*****S there has got to be a way to stop this once and for all (leagaly of course ;_) know what i mean)

as if that ever bothered me i dont think so gimme a nuke I'll stop the rot dead in it's tracks ... :~)

So, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20210413040252/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061103201234813">Novell, meet Faust</a>. Novell has signed a deal with Microsoft wherein Novell will pay protection money to Microsoft in exchange for Microsoft threatening to sue all Linux users who aren't paying Novell customers, on the grounds of heretofore undemonstrated patent liabilities.

This is the SCO scam writ larger (and more credible). It will redound to Novell's benefit in the short term, possibly, but it comes at a tremendous long-term strategic cost. By entering into this deal, Novell has endorsed Microsoft's unsubstantiated claims of ownership over patents covering Linux, as well as put their own product at risk. Novell doesn't own their own IP, you see.. the Linux kernel is an amalgam of the work of many thousands of people, licensed under the GPL. Under clause 7 of the GPL, Novell cannot distribute GPL-licensed code to some parties if they do not have the same rights to redistribute without acquiring a patent license. At the press conference between Novell and Microsoft, there were some claims made to the effect that the deal was carefully designed not to run into conflict with the GPL, but the only real attempt to deal with clause 7 seems to be the use of the term 'covenant not to sue', rather than 'license'. I doubt that would fly in court, if push came to shove. Novell might well lose the right to distribute Linux at all if they try to push this.

Of course, it's not all sour vinegar. To sweeten the deal some, Microsoft has promised not to sue any individual developers who work on open source products without getting paid for it, so long as <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200407131927/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061103073628401">they don't do anything gauche</a> such as, you know, actually try to distribute their work.

And this last was touted in the credulous press as a great fluffy bunny rainbow puppy dog concession by Microsoft.

Incredible.

Apparently, Novell had some heavy duty patents that Microsoft was on the wrong side of, so you'd think that they could have come out of the deal better than they went in to it. Microsoft did pay them a lot of money, apparently, but that money was a lump sum, while Novell is on the hook to pay that money back, and more, in royalties over the next five years. The more successful Novell is at screwing Red Hat, the more business they accumulate, the less of that lump sum they'll have left in the bank. Cost to Microsoft in this circumstance? Zero.

Or, as Mastercard would put it:

Resolving patent liabilities by paying Novell: $500 million
Gaining a per-unit royalty on all Linux sold: priceless

Of course, neither party announced the amount that Novell got out of the deal, but one has to presume that it'll show up in their SEC filings before too long.

Now. To look at this from another angle, and assuming for the moment that Novell will not lose their right to redistribute the Linux kernel due to a GPL violation, there are some things to be said about this deal from Novell's point of view.

First, Novell gets a huge stick to use against Red Hat. In an instant, they may gain some credibility in the corporate world, particularly in heterogeneous environments with Microsoft installations. This could be the sand on the snow they need to really grab some traction and start being a force in the market.

Second, as shitty as this deal is by any Open Source standard, it's a hell of a lot better deal than anyone else has ever got from Microsoft. Novell is in control of their own API's, and is free to configure and sell distributions without Microsoft's permissions. In a world where an HP or a Dell can't chose to sell Windows boxes without Microsoft revenue streams attached, (to say nothing of actual components like Internet Explorer), this is an extraordinary amount of freedom. If Novell were to actually catch fire with this deal and start selling in the high tens of millions of units shipped, that's a lot of money that Microsoft is letting go to a relatively independent vassal, and I don't think they've ever let that happen before.

In effect, Microsoft is attempting to trade ownership and control of the operating system for ownership and control over the rights to sell the operating system. Assuming their royalty rates are non-trivial, this could be the cheapest money Microsoft's ever made.

Best of all, from Microsoft's perspective, is that this is a time-limited deal, set to expire in five years. If Novell really does somehow become a Linux colossus, the Microsoft of five years from now will just decline to re-up on the deal, or will drastically spike the royalties, and Novell will be up against the wall, alone, without a viable industry of Linux companies to partner with.

Microsoft has done this sort of thing from day one. Microsoft famously forced Apple to give them the rights to the Windows interface in exchange for Microsoft allowing Apple to continue to have Applesoft BASIC back in the early 80's, after the initial licensing agreement expired. Apple wasn't expecting to lose Applesoft at the time, wasn't prepared for it, couldn't afford to let it die, and so gave Microsoft the keys to the kingdom that would power them for the next 20 years. And two years later, the Apple ][ was completely irrelevant in the market, and the value that they had traded for was dust.

Negotiating with Microsoft is like dining with Hannibal Lecter. They're smarter than you, and they're a whole lot more vicious. No matter what you think you're getting out of the deal, you're in grave danger.

----8<----
Dear Sir:

We have with astonishment noticed the deal your company have done with
Microsoft.

As a Linux User Group, we can not anymore risk having the Novell/SuSE
distribution in our distro library - the collection of distributions we loan out to our members.
We also have to stop all support of the SuSE distributions.

If the deal is withdrawn, we will of course be willing to include SuSE again.

Until that happy moment, we hereby cut all connections with Novell and SuSE.

Yours truly

Kim B. Christensen
Secretary, ALSLUG (Alssund GNU/Linux User Group)
Denmark

----8<----

" ... while I'm not going to go into a long diatribe about how I do not agree that I need Microsoft permission via Novell to use Samba or much of any free software, I will say this to my open source developer friends at Novell: The Google Engineering Staff and Open Source teams are hiring."

As to all the political talk: guys, this isn't the Spanish Civil War or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. You want good and evil, go rent LOTR.

The recasts the debate into;
you are either for the gpl, or you are for
microsoft, and all microsoft wants is to make money, is that wrong?
The gpl crowd wants to restrict your control over your own code!
microsoft just wants to stay in business.

brilliant move.

How this shakes out, imho.

Few will sign,
Novell will die.
RedHat gets some more much deserved credit for being a white knight.
'Open Source' gets wholly co-opted.
we all just get on with the day's tasks.