-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Miguel Angel Alvarez wrote:
El Sábado, 4 de Noviembre de 2006 09:53, Andreas Hanke escribió:
Tony Pott schrieb:
To all the people at SuSE, I know this isn't your fault, and I'm sorry I have to stop using your excellent work. I'm sad to have to change to another distro, I've been a fanboy since SuSE 8.0, but this deal is just disgusting.
Agreed, it is very disgusting, like going home to find your wife in bed with the worst guy of the office.
Maybe if you're working for Novell. As a member of the openSUSE.org community, I don't feel much affected by this (except all the FUD and crap written against SUSE Linux these days). It's a big business deal between N and MS, has pretty much nothing to do with the community effort, opensource or whatever. It's a PR and sales move by Novell. There are certainly still a lot of businesses out there that are MS shops and their suits are afraid of using Linux because they believe the FUD that they could be put into court for patent litigation. What the agreement means for Novell: they're now most probably going to sell a lot more of SLED and SLES. What it means for openSUSE.org: not much, except that if SLED/SLES sales go up, it will make the Linux products more profitable, hence more support, hence no bankruptancy, etc... Why is Redhat so pissed now (and spreading some FUD through Redhat employees that work on the Fedora project) ? Pretty simple: for those undecided suits that are afraid of patent litigation... if they use Linux, which enterprise distro will they pick ? Novell or Redhat ? Most probably Novell.
Nobody gets what "this" deal is about, but you already know that it
It is true, we haven't been in those negociations, but there is the History for all to see.... no need to be an expert. Do you think MS will play nice now all of a sudden?
It has absolutely nothing to do with MS playing nice, nor Novell playing nice with MS. It's an agreement. It's business and big money. Sun has a similar agreement with MS since April, and Sun is definitely yet another business that has a long history of hating MS. Did it kill Sun ? Not by any means. Will it kill Novell ? IMO it will be quite the opposite (read above).
Read Groklaw, it has a good coverage and analisys
Groklaw and other blog posters concentrate a lot on one single point: the IP litigation protection. I just fail to see how this makes any difference to the situation before (except for SLED/SLES customers, to whom it is some sort of a benefit). Nothing has prevented MS from trying to attack Linux businesses on potential IP litigation before. The only bad thing about it is: Novell is acknowledging IP/patents. But Novell has a big patent portfolio on its own, so it doesn't really come as a surprise. I'm afraid we shouldn't expect too much patent-fighting from Novell anyway. The fact that Novell might violate the GPL if there is an IP litigation case against other Linux businesses (e.g. Redhat) and if MS wins that litigation case in court, it would mean that e.g. Redhat would be condemned, but not Novell. This is a pretty hypothetical theory, as there hasn't been any successful IP litigation claim against the Linux kernel or other opensource projects until now (that's what SCO tried to do). And without the Novell/MS agreement, the situation would have been exactly the same, except that SLED/SLES customers would have been a potential target as well.
forces you to stop using the distribution. Highly interesting.
It doesn't stop me now, but may be in the future.... Just an example, would you use and promote SCOldera OpenLinux?
Geez, comparing apples and pigs here. Novell is a major contributor to opensource by having a lot of developers on a lot of OSS projects on its payroll. Novell is aggressively (maybe not enough though) pushing Linux into the enterprise and desktop space. How is that comparable to SCO, by any means ?
Can you please read the announcement and point out which of the following prevents you from using the distribution: Patent coverage ------>>>>>>>MS Taxing linux (Novell to pay MS for Linux??? Thats very wrong!) Patent protection racket ("Hi red head, nice linux have you got here, it would be a pity if something bad happened..... see those shushi, they pay us and have no worries")
Indeed. But does that make any change to the situation before the agreement ? Not really.
False protection for hobbyists for their *own* use of their *own* work, absolutely unneeded
Right, same as before.
Weakens anti sw patents side in Europe
Funny how everyone (especially outside of Europe) thinks this means Novell would suddenly turn pro-swpats in Europe. Have you seen this happen ? Where ? No you haven't, so let's wait and see how Novell will behave wrt that.
Makes easier for MS to launch patent attacks on the community and protects them against antitrust issues
Really. You think MS needed that agreement to do so ? It does protect MS from infringement claims against Novell's patent portfolio.
Weakens patent commons efforts
Still to prove.
Virtualization Virtualization Management
We have that now: Qemu, xen, vmware,.... We don't need linux as a flacky toy program under windows See vista EULA
If *you*'re not interested in using MS' virtualization software, then just don't do so, period. I won't touch it with a stick either. But there are people out there who are using it, and now they will get support for using SLED/SLES as guest VMs. That's a good thing for Novell sales. Does it do any harm to you or openSUSE.org or the opensource community as a whole ? Totally not.
Office Open XML
A stab in the back of OpenDocument.
That one might be correct, if and only if we think the only chance to make ODF the only standard (including de-facto) is that everyone except MS is behind ODF and have MS being the only one pushing "open xml". It doesn't mean Novell won't be pushing ODF btw. OTOH, if ODF fails to become the one and only document format, it'll be a good thing for everyone to have full-fledged "open xml" support in OO.o
Eases Office XML path for ISO, damages standards
Dunno, possibly. But I'm afraid MS doesn't need that to get it through ECMA. And once it's through ECMA, it'll get through ISO pretty easily. True, they will be able to say "look, OpenOffice.org supports open xml as well" at some point in time. But I really doubt they wouldn't have been able to push it through ECMA and ISO without that. Stop believing ECMA and ISO have anything to do with ethics.
Collaboration Framework
With MS? HA HA HA HA HA! Where have you been..... the last 20 years or so?
And where have you been the last year or so ? MS and Sun are already "collaborating". Is Sun a MS shop ? hardly so
Mono, OpenOffice and Samba
Jeopardizes future of those projects, specially mono
Mono was already jeopardized in the first place, from day 1. No wonder Miguel is happy about the deal. He was the very vocal one saying that "nooo, no problem, it's an ECMA standard" - that, indeed, is a lot of BS, but that's not quite the point here. However, the agreement does mean that mono, OO.o and samba will not be attacked by MS through IP infringement claims. That's certainly good news, as it means the developers of those projects can happily keep on hacking and make it more interoperable with .NET, open xml/other MS formats and MS AD, respectively.
Damages EU antitrust efforts (documentation of win32 network interfaces)
Not by any means. The EU still wants those documents from MS.
Sorry but you just wrote a lot of very hypothetical stuff that is really
far-fetched and drawn from your imagination.
Mind you, I'm not really happy about the agreement either, at least
right now.
But as said before on the list, "wait and see" is most probably the best
attitude atm. We just do not know yet whether it will be beneficial to
Novell SLES/SLED sales, openSUSE.org or the OSS community as a whole.
It sure looks like it can bring a benefit to all of these right now, but
we'll see.
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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