LWN: Comments on "Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)"

+1 Insightful

rahvin — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:40:03 +0000

If you invest directly you receive the paper work to vote in every shareholder vote. In addition, it is possible to select mutal funds who take more interest in the running of the companies they invest in, but conversely their fees are higher.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

cmccabe — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 06:08:39 +0000

I think you're really naive if you think Red Hat can afford to ignore the patent problem. Building a defensive patent portfolio is the only reasonable approach when you have a business to protect.

Also, what part of the community doesn't believe in defensive patent portfolios? RMS thinks they're fine.

> When FOSS people say "we need to have patents, just in case",
> I suspect they mean "... we need to extort some money from someone."

You're free to suspect anything you want, including that your mailman is a covert CIA operative sent to kill you. But before you get out the rifle, how about thinking about what is reasonable in this situation. Who would you trust to own these patents more than Red Hat? RH was one of the few companies to file an amicus brief at the Bilski case strongly opposing software patents. Google and IBM, despite their support for free software in general, are ambiguous about the subject. I think IBM even wrote a pro-patent brief.

+1 Insightful

man_ls — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:19:01 +0000

Millions of stockholders grasping a few shares will not be much different than a handful of huge mutual funds: small-time investors will not have a say in the future of the company even if they are millions, and shareholder meetings will only accept big portfolios.

+1 Insightful

rahvin — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:52:57 +0000

Monkey's picking stocks randomly beat the average wall street trader (that does it for a living) 90% of the time. You could do no worse and simple plans like the Dow 4 and the Dividend investing involve taking a once a year look at your stocks and adjusting based on the current numbers and the average return bests wall street by a few percentage (that includes the S&P index).

Mutual funds as I said are the opportunity for the casual investor to abrogate responsibility for their investment to some other individual using a "known" plan. And that is exactly the problem, we have hundreds of millions of people in the market who collectively own a huge percentage of the entire stock market that have zero say in how those companies are being run. This leaves management of the company to the CEO and board (who as I said are usually other CEO's). The wolf's been watching the farmhouse for decades here, and that's one of the prime reasons we had the banking problems that caused this most recent recession. And regardless of the amount of regulation or other rules put into the kitty the problem is going to keep repeating itself until ordinary people take responsibility for their investments.

+1 Insightful

njs — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:02:11 +0000

But investing in a small number of hand-picked stocks is just a bad strategy. You have a high risk (all it takes is one stupid CEO or industrial accident or whatever to blow up a significant portion of your portfolio), and to get a good return you have to consistently outsmart the bastards on Wall Street (good luck).

Funds make it possible for individual investors with small amounts of capital to diversify. Of course you're still better off with something like an index fund, though, to minimize the "fees and other people's bad stock picks" -- but they don't give you any more influence over the company.

+1 Insightful

dmarti — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:36:28 +0000

Unfortunately this will go on as long as US middle-class investors are more afraid of being responsible for losing their retirement savings through a bad stock pick than of losing their retirement savings to fees and other people's bad stock picks. Mutual funds are a way to pretend to buy out of stewardship of your own wealth.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

Ed_L. — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 20:55:12 +0000

Google "Open Invention Network". Novell is a founding member.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

whitemice — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 13:18:56 +0000

Eh? VMware's hypervisor *suite* has an enormous feature-set and code-base. The Hypervisor is just a tiny component; without the tools to make it manageable, make it fault-tolerant, etc... it is as worthless... well... Xen.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

rahvin — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 05:24:34 +0000

Shareholders haven't made decisions or had any say in the company in decades. The massive popularity of mutual funds as a means for the investor to abrogate responsibility to the mutual fund company eliminated shareholder involvement and even say in the operations of the company.

This combined with the reality that most mutual funds have zero involvement in the company has resulted in most public companies being run by the CEO exclusively with the board of directors being nothing more than a bunch of other CEO's. The result is one person at the helm and no one watching them. This has resulted in the last two decades of CEO's operating companies only for themselves and their own short term benefit without regard to the company or it's long term prospects.

Just because a company is public, don't blame it's actions on what the stockholders want as the majority could want something completely different but no longer have any say.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

oompah — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 18:32:04 +0000

As Novell is sold off in pieces, there is an opportunity to acquire patents that are of particular interest to the community. Ideally, the patents would go to some form of non-profit organized to insure open access to the intellectual property.

To finance the purchase, there are ways to gain a tax benefit for the seller, perhaps a white knight can benefit from contributing to a purchase fund, and of course, there are all the other creative ideas the community can produce to make something good happen.

Is anybody working on this and how can we help?

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

kunitz — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:26:36 +0000

Novell is profitable, but the revenue is shrinking. In the last quarter report even the Linux revenue were down year-over-year. In March the board declined an offer to pay $5.75 per share. Now the board has to ensure that stock holders get more than this price per share. The shrinking revenue leaves them only the option to sell the company.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

jengelh — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:26:18 +0000

>Which means, ALWAYS up for sale.

Ah so it's the share holders who had enough of Novell, not the execs.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

cjcox — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:18:35 +0000

Novell was doing ok business wise. Yes... believe it or not, Novell actually struggled a bit in 2009 and part way into 2010 :-)

What killed Novell is that they are a PUBLIC company. Which means, ALWAYS up for sale. And so an investment company (possibly a typical pump and dump) tendered an offer... it was a low ball bid... but the damage was done. 99.9999999% of the time when this happens to any technology company, the company is FORCED to sell. Sad but true.

Novell, with a very large stock pile of cash, had the opportunity to take themselves private again, but either didn't try or was unable to pull it off.

So... here they are.... victims of a tragic bid made a long time ago now... forced to sell. The ONLY beneficiaries are the Novell board and exec team. Which is also sad since they have a lot to say about being sold.

Unlike Ubuntu, there's no shining knight with a large cash supply to take over or fork SLE. Can somebody talk to Mark Cuban? :-)

Those German Linux dudes are smart cookies... it will be very sad to seem them split apart all the way (yes, there has been some hemorrhaging for the past 5 years or so).

I have to use both SLES and RHEL where I work and I can tell you there is a HUGE reason why our infrastructure is built on SLES. In fact, until RHEL5 came out, IMHO, Red Hat didn't have an enterprise class Linux. SUSE's Enterprise Linux has been enterprise class for a long time, we started with SLES7 (yes... even SLES7 was a gabillion times better than Red Hat's RHELAS 2.1 product). RHAS 3 came (yes... it GA'd) with broken NFS (what??). Red Hat didn't support Java at ALL until it became open... and the list goes on and on. Everything from LVM, journaled filesystems, multipathing, multiple network setup, ... all of these things were BETTER in SLES than in Red Hat's enterprise product line throughout the years. Again, RHEL5, IMHO, is Red Hat's first real product... and even then, it's not perfect (not saying SLES 11 is perfect... just more perfect).

If you're looking for enterprise Linux that interfaces to ... well... other enterprise Linux, then RHEL works ok (not great, but ok).

If you're looking for enterprise Linux that works with other Unix platforms and works in a Windows environment, then there's only one good choice right now, SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

jengelh — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 20:02:26 +0000

Why exactly is Novell selling itself off? Was it unable to make a reasonable profit like Sun?

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

nim-nim — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:14:14 +0000

I'm quite sceptical of the assertion that VMWare would not monetize the Suse business. Even if VMWare accepted that it would never be hugely profitable, what makes Suse great today (engineering, certifications) requires working constantly with big Suse accounts, which is quite expensive. It needs to at least pay for itself if it's not to become a money sink.

It's a different business than the hypervisor one. An hypervisor does not need a huge feature set, because the smarts are in the VMs, but VMs do need a huge feature set and that's expensive to maintain.

Of course from a Canonical POW it would be better for the Suse business to evaporate (or convince the market it's going to evaporate).

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

JoeBuck — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 03:42:30 +0000

"Firstly, parts of the community don't like patents in any form, so holding patents even in the way that Red Hat does makes groups like the FSF less friendly."

You misunderstand the FSF's position, they don't have any objection to defensive patents in the current environment.

See RMS writing on the subject. I think it would be great to combine Novell's patent pool with Red Hat's patent policies.

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

mmcgrath — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:30:52 +0000

I believe the legal term is estoppel

Novell's Patents Are Complicating Its Sale (GigaOm)

PaulWay — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:57:03 +0000

>> In a world of rough-and-tumble patent litigation, Red Hat
>> cant continue to bring vague rally-the-troops, anti-patent
>> jingoism to a knife fight.

Well, no bias in that statement then...

I don't think Red Hat's stance on patents is vague: they have patents, they promise that every patent they have will remain unencumbered for use by the FOSS community, and they believe software patents impede business and development. [http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html] They've been quite consistent on that.

I don't think owning a big patent policy is part of that strategy; ergo, I think your whole supposition that Red Hat is interested in Novell's patents is somewhat without factual basis.

"Defensive Patent War Chests" are more trouble than they're worth. Firstly, parts of the community don't like patents in any form, so holding patents even in the way that Red Hat does makes groups like the FSF less friendly. Secondly, I don't think any of Red Hat's competitors would seriously hold back on patent litigation if they thought they could get away with it, defensive patents or not. Defensive patent counter-claims take even longer in the courts, cost more money and time, and it becomes a race to see who can get an injunction on whose business first. They're not a doomsday device - deterring by their mere existence - they're like any other weapon: they have their own deployment time, can still kill off your friends, and if you can't deploy it in time then you might as well not have it.

When FOSS people say "we need to have patents, just in case", I suspect they mean "... we need to extort some money from someone."

Have fun,

Paul