Novell News

January 14, 2004

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

Novell has been fairly busy on the Linux front the last few days. The company wrapped up its acquisition of SUSE Linux and announced an indemnification program for its enterprise Linux customers on Tuesday. The company has also released its correspondence with the SCO group from May 12, 2003 to January 7, 2004 concerning SCO's suit against IBM and other issues related to the suit.

For the most part, it would seem to be business as usual for SUSE. Novell spokesperson Bruce Lowry said that there are no changes afoot, at this time, for SUSE's product line as a result of the acquisition. Though some have expressed concern about SUSE's commitment to KDE now that Novell owns both SUSE and Ximian, Lowry said that there are no plans to cease the inclusion of KDE in SUSE's Linux distribution or SUSE's work on KDE.

We're about empowering choice, not eliminating it...it's something that we will be looking at, but our DNA would say that we want to continue to support choice. Both are great desktop solutions. We'll just have to evaluate how we want to proceed in the coming months.

Apparently, Novell has decided it needs to go ahead with an indemnification plan to assure its customers. The plan does not apply to all SUSE Linux customers. Instead, the plan covers customers who are using SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 8 and obtain "upgrade protection" from Novell and a technical support contract from Novell or SUSE channel partner. According to this article the indemnification is capped at 1.25 times the purchase price, or $1.5 million. It is interesting to note that Novell's indemnification plan announced this week covers claims of copyright infringement only, not patent suits. Since many have speculated that patent suits will be the next legal hurdle for Linux, Novell customers may not receive quite as much joy from the indemnification program as they might have hoped.

Naturally, SCO CEO Darl McBride couldn't resist commenting on Novell's indemnification plan:

We believe Novell's indemnification announcement is significant for a couple of reasons. By announcing the program they are acknowledging the problems with Linux. Through the restrictions and the limitations on the program, they are showing their unwillingness to bet very much on their position.

Lowry said that Novell's indemnification is not "to protect people from SCO, it's to give software buyers the same level of comfort" that they receive when purchasing proprietary software. Lowry said that Novell has no plans to contribute to the Open Source Development Labs' (OSDL) legal fund, though they are a member of OSDL, since they are offering their own indemnification plan.

Novell also released 31 pieces of correspondence between Novell and the SCO Group concerning Novell's contractual and ownership rights over UNIX. The filings are, to say the least, interesting reading. (LWN readers can find many of the letters in plain text format in this Groklaw posting.) Much of the correspondence is one-way, with no response from SCO on several issues raised by Novell.

After it was made public that Novell was planning to acquire SUSE, McBride said in a conference call that they would "take measures to enforce the noncompete agreement with Novell. I don't know that it will turn into a lawsuit. That depends upon how they respond, and if they put a competitive product in the marketplace."

One of the pieces of correspondence to SCO from Novell is a letter dated November 19, 2003, taking issue with McBride's claims that the acquisition would violate any non-compete provisions, and noting that SCO has not raised the issue directly with Novell. There is no response from SCO regarding that letter in the correspondence released by Novell. Despite a number of public threats of legal action made by SCO, and threats contained in SCO's correspondence with Novell, Lowry said that no legal filings had taken place in either direction at this time.

One concern that Linux users and companies might have is that, if Novell does have claim to the UNIX copyrights and other intellectual property, Novell could someday cause the same kinds of legal troubles that SCO has. Lowry said that he acknowledges that is a theoretical possibility, but notes that Novell has done nothing to indicate that it would want to harm Linux. "Novell has shown with its words and actions that it is 100 percent committed to promote Linux, not impede it."

At the moment, Novell's acquisition of SUSE appears to be a good thing for SUSE and the Linux community as a whole. Novell appears to have taken a mostly "hands-off" approach with Ximian, and may be prepared to do the same with SUSE. Novell's position in the industry is also likely to open doors for Linux that might not have been open otherwise.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticles	Brockmeier, Joe

Keep the existing customer base too...

Posted Jan 15, 2004 3:46 UTC (Thu) by freeio (guest, #9622) [Link] (1 responses)

It is interesting to see the official reason for continuing with SuSE and KDE. The official line is one we need to hear:

"We're about empowering choice, not eliminating it...it's something that we will be looking at, but our DNA would say that we want to continue to support choice. Both are great desktop solutions. We'll just have to evaluate how we want to proceed in the coming months."

There is another issue here, and that is holding onto the base market which SuSE has cultivated. SuSE has historically been considered an European distro, along with Mandrake, and both are KDE-centric. In spite of being bought by Novell, a North American company, SuSE has the one-time opportunity to either keep or drop its base market. Novell has to think long and hard about this matter, as departure from what brought SuSE this far will potentially burn the bridges with many current users.

So Novell's decision not to be hasty in this matter is a valid one. Not everyone agrees that the "single desktop must prevail" model is the best one for free software, and the Gnome-centric position seems to be well-established with other distros. If Novell can keep both Gnome and KDE sides happy, they can easily inherit some of the market which has been burned by the "we don't want or need KDE since the Qt library upon which it is based is GPLed" crowd.

(As you can see, I disagree with Bruce Perens on this one specific matter.)

Keep the existing customer base too...

Posted Jan 15, 2004 4:55 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

For that matter, it is increasingly looking like the single desktop which
will prevail is a pair of compatibility layers, such that users can pick
and choose individual programs and have any choice fit the style of their
desktop. It's still a long way off (particularly from the point of view
of developers), but before long, it'll be possible to make users not
notice.

Novell News

Posted Jan 15, 2004 19:29 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

Bruce Lowry of Novell is quoted:

"Novell has shown with its words and actions that it is 100 percent committed to promote Linux, not impede it."

Caldera at one time showed with its words and actions that it was 100 percent committed to promote Linux. Look where that's gone.

However, there does not seem to be any reason to doubt Novell's sincerity.