Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source? [LWN.net]

Jos Poortvliet talks with Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn. "What is Attachmate's history with open source projects? Attachmate does not have a corporate track record in the open source business. However, we recognize the importance of open source technology, particularly Linux, and the growing value it brings to enterprises globally. We also recognize and value the openSUSE project, the contribution that the community makes to the SUSE business and most importantly, the many ways in which the community benefits SUSE customers."

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Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 20:05 UTC (Mon) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link] (13 responses)

I can feel the Attachmate synergy already.

"Much more integration work needs to happen before discussions of changing the status of individual projects can occur"

Me read

"Much more closed source "glue" code needs to be added before we can start charging money for people using the open source code...Wait I mean we just want the IP so we can sue you. What you mean we have to maintain the code for free? We didn't buy any code."

Anyways, just being pessimistic as my nature leads me to be.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 20:18 UTC (Mon) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link]

typo in the last line, let me fix it for you:

s/pessimistic/realistic/

there, that's better.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 21:28 UTC (Mon) by bryen (guest, #60640) [Link] (10 responses)

I think its kind of natural, given the history of a number of corporations that attempted to make its foray into the open source world, to be suspicious of anyone Simply put, its a culture clash. And its not a bad thing to have those suspicions. Keeping everyone on their toes does in fact keep us all in check. But it is a bad thing to condemn before we even get out of the gate. We cannot foster a world that embraces open source if we make everyone feel welcome before they even begin to do any work.

Attachmate does have a lot to learn. So did all of us when we first started out in open source, in our various initiatives. We learned. Some faster than others. And Attachmate deserves to be given at least a chance to learn as well.

I should point out that Hawn did state in this interview that he considers SUSE should be its own separate unit rather than folding it into some other unit. Which means he doesn't see this as something you're going to steal from Peter (one unit) to pay Paul (another unit with completely different objectives.)

But here's what I really see as the true story here. Attachmate is a newcomer standing at the doorway looking inside our community with anticipation and excitement. This is the opportunity for us to grab their hand and guide them into the community and watch them roll up their sleeves and get busy. We have an opportunity at this very start to engage and educate and broaden open source's reach in this world and to build a favorable view on both sides. And this opportunity only comes once in a newcomer's life. Seize the opportunity to build a real future, not one of animosity right out the gate.

Bryen M Yunashko

Correction:

Posted Dec 20, 2010 21:32 UTC (Mon) by bryen (guest, #60640) [Link]

I said:

"But it is a bad thing to condemn before we even get out of the gate. We cannot foster a world that embraces open source if we make everyone feel welcome before they even begin to do any work."

But I meant to say:

"But it is a bad thing to condemn before we even get out of the gate. We cannot foster a world that embraces open source if we make everyone feel *UN*welcome before they even begin to do any work."

Apologies for the faux pas.

Bryen

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 22:19 UTC (Mon) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link] (8 responses)

Selling 882 patents to CPTN Holdings LLC(Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC) is not the best way to engage the Open Source community.

As you stated, time will only tell what Attachmate's true intentions are for the Purchase.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 22:26 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Attachmate isn't selling those patents, Novell is. Attachmate never has ownership of the patents.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 22:35 UTC (Mon) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link]

"Selling 882 patents to CPTN Holdings LLC(Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC) is not the best way to engage the Open Source community."

My statement here might not be true. Further, reading shows it is possible that the patent deal is not directly related to Attachmate, but it is not very clear.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 22:56 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (2 responses)

Based on my reading of the press releases Attachmate didn't sell anything to anyone. Novell brokered a deal to sell SUSE and the legacy netware product lines to Attachmate and simultaneously brokered a deal to sell the patents to a separate entity. This was done to maximize equity and probably because Attachmate couldn't afford to purchase the whole thing or that they simply didn't want the patents which caused Novell to look for another buyer.

Don't blame them for not wanting the Patents. They shouldn't be blamed for not wanting to buy 882 patents that the Supreme Court could declare worthless in the next few years. The silliness of the patent situation is going to drive some legal reform. There is a critical storm of patent cases with dramatically different resolutions in the circuit courts resulting in both parties petitioning the Supreme Court and I'm fairly confident that in some future case they will decide that patenting idea's and not implementations isn't constitutional. (IMO thats exactly what a software or business method patent is, a patent on an abstract Idea, not a specific implementation) If you also believe that software and business method patents are doomed would you pay several billion dollars for a bunch of patents?

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 23:17 UTC (Mon) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah I agree, initially I read this article:
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2010/12/17/a...

I highly doubt I am the only person to confuse this issue. Anyways, I wish Attachmate the best of luck and hope I am wrong.

All I can say is that if I was purchasing Novell to gain Novell's brand, I would not want to do it in conjunction with a sketchy patent deal involving Microsoft and buddies.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 23:29 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Personally my concern isn't Attachmate, they will either learn quickly or Suse will die or be forked. Either way the community will be fine.

The issue that bothers me the most about the patent sale is that it doesn't appear the patents were auctioned off to the highest bidder. This sale reeks of an insider deal that involves the executives at Novel selling to a specific group with the promise of future compensation to the exec's. It's concerning that they don't appear to have opened negotiations for any bidder to purchase as I believe there would have been several dozen patent collectives that would have chased the patents (including OIN).

It also bothers me that the largest shareholders don't appear to be concerned by this sale looking a bit like an inside deal. It's all too suspicious that a company that has sued MS a dozen times over these patents suddenly sold them all to a company at least partially owned by MS. The press releases only discuss the bidding for the assets Attachmate wants with no mention of any sort of shopping around on the patents. It's incredibly suspicious to me and points to an inside deal as this is typically how it's done, a key asset is shaved off the sale and sold to a specific entity (at a discount) with the promise of future quid-pro-quo.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 22, 2010 13:12 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

[Novell] Selling 882 patents to CPTN Holdings LLC(Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC) is not the best way to engage the Open Source community.

What disgusts me is how a bunch of dominant companies, some bordering on monopolies (and, short of that, demonstrating clear monopolist tendencies), get together to share ownership in a holding company dealing in monopoly/anticompetitive instruments, and this doesn't seem to appear on any regulatory radar screen.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 22, 2010 16:16 UTC (Wed) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link] (1 responses)

This hasn't been (widely) pointed out, and this is as good as a place as any.

If Attachmate is buying some Novell for SuSE and its other well-known products, isn't it fair to conclude that the patents in question aren't strongly related to SuSE and the other well-known Novell products? Or to put things another way, if any of those patents were critical for current revenue-generating Novell products to continue, any sane buyer would either buy all or nothing. The split-deal is interesting, but its not like companies are scrambling to pick up scraps of a dead Novell, either.

There isn't strong argument that this is a defensive purchase by Attachmate, that they are entirely willing to buy up Novell, so they can kill it off on their terms, rather than the scraps being available to the competition. Attachmate doesn't currently play in the same space as Novell; Novell scraps wouldn't help any of Attachmates competitors. Competing products.

Is it that hard to believe that Attachmate sees value in SuSE and Novell products, and they complement their current businesses? And that this set of patents is irrelevant to both tn3270 clients, and the current SuSE/Novell products?

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 22, 2010 18:19 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Attachmate is likely being provided a license to use all the patents in question with the purchase. They don't need to be worried about the patents because they will be licensed to use them. Now whether that license would affect other GPL projects that are included in SUSE is another question altogether.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 9:28 UTC (Tue) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]

In context (bear in mind that this is a CEO talking), I think "integration" refers to the business integration you have to do after a merger, not code integration.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 20:43 UTC (Mon) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] (6 responses)

I don't share the negative thoughts about the "we don't know yet" answers; Novell is a public company, and until the deal closes, Attachmate is not much more than just a regular shareholder.... integration+investigation can only really start at the actual closing of the deal.

However, the whole interview talks about "taking from Open Source" and "using what the community provides".. but nothing about giving back to the community..other than a little blurb about the kernel.
I suspect Attachmate has a lot of learning to do....

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 21:06 UTC (Mon) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link]

Long live SUSE/OpenSUSE

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 6:43 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (4 responses)

To be fair, he stated several times that they want to participate and invest in the community. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and some time for the dust to settle before judging.

I can remember the uproar when SuSE was bought by Novell and the end of the world scenarios. In the final analysis I'd say that quite to the contrary it was a very good thing to happen. I can't remember any incident where Novell really hurt the community (even the infamous Microsoft deal has not had any consequences yet and it's been years). Instead they founded the openSUSE project, put Yast under GPL and built tools like the openSUSE build service, that even helps other distributions.

Could very well be that Attachmate will just continue in that direction and that a standalone SUSE business unit can be more free in a technical sense as well. Integrating and developing Novell's middleware did for sure take a lot of resources.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 8:26 UTC (Tue) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (3 responses)

> even the infamous Microsoft deal has not had any consequences yet and it's been years

I can name four consequences: Mono, Moonlight, Banshee and F-Spot. The Novell-Microsoft deal is the sole reason why a Microsoft-owned platform is invading our Linux desktops.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 8:34 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think so. These projects are driven by Novell and perhaps were part of the motivation into signing the deal but other distributions adopting them by default has nothing whatsoever to do with the Microsoft deal. As far as Fedora is concerned however, none of these are included by default. So it is "invading" anything.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 8:39 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

And quite ironically, even an openSUSE desktop does not use them by default.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 19:37 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

Even more ironically, Ubuntu which has not deal with MS (to my knowledge) does.

Reliable second source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 15:56 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

The rest of the IT industry needs a reliable second source for Linux. Red Hat might not be able to use legal means to become the dominant vendor, but network effects are almost as powerful--especially for being able to support legacy and/or proprietary applications.

The most cost-effective way for SuSE to stay viable as a second source is to work upstream. Keep the kernel crew together, do hardware support, bug fixes, and performance improvements, and don't try to maintain anything too far out of line with kernel.org or RHEL. IMHO, you can tell when a company actually has large-scale customers by reading "git log," because for those customers, "support" includes kernel hacking. Having two companies that can do this for large business workloads will keep the rest of the industry happy.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 23:58 UTC (Tue) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (1 responses)

While they may not be an open source company, they do seem to be a strongly UNIX-oriented company, which is better than nothing. Unix may not be / may not have been open source per se, but it has strong traditions of sharing code, via Usenet, etc. From what I can gather, Attachmate started as a terminal manufacturer, and switched to making cross-platform connectivity software when the bottom fell out of the terminal market. There's always potential for things to go wrong in a situation like this, but I'm not seeing any red flags (no blatant history of cutting deals with MS, for example). As others have said, it's the other half of the deal (the patent consortium) that worries me.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 26, 2010 10:19 UTC (Sun) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

Seems like the guy learned what openSUSE is only during the interview :)