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Welcome to virtuallinux.org. You are currently reading the article "Top 5 myths about the Microsoft-Novell deal". All articles on virtuallinux.org pertain to the ongoing assult on the worlds greatest Operating system. Continue on reading about "Top 5 myths about the Microsoft-Novell deal"
Top 5 myths about the Microsoft-Novell deal
Posted on Tuesday, December 05 2006 @ 22:05:03 EST by linuxwiz |
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Novell's actions are part of a conspiracy
Novell/SUSE/Ximian is too big and diverse of a company to pull off a
conspiracy successfully. And everyone I know there is down with one
variant or other of the software freedom plan. There probably aren't
enough potential conspirators there to pull off one working program,
much less a whole distribution.
The inner circle that negotiated the deal did a really bad job of
getting consensus internally, and that's not just a matter of
communications -- they completely seem to have expected that people who
voluntarily apply the GPL to their software would be happy with a
weaselly attempt to evade the GPL's spirit. (All I can think is that to
sales guys the Deal is more important than the Rules, and the inner
circle lumped the GPL under Rules, which can be bent to make the Deal,
while to the stakeholders, the GPL still falls in the Deal category.)
Miguel de Icaza came up with an accurate but unpersuasive blog entry
[1] about the OfficeXML tool for OpenOffice. For a long time, Miguel
has taken the position that software patents are everywhere so there's
no point following what might be a safer-looking, Microsoft-averse,
path that avoids the more obvious Microsoft-flavored technologies.
After all, Microsoft itself wasn't safe from Eolas. This is entirely a
reasonable position to take if you're up front about your license
situation, but it doesn't work in combination with secret deals. What
we have here is not a conspiracy but a misunderstanding in the inner
circle that led to a blunder.
Microsoft is going to become a patent troll
What has Eolas or NTP invented lately? If Microsoft starts fighting
off startups with lawyers instead of competitive software or service,
the company loses its mojo, stops attracting new developers, and fades
away. I think Microsoft realizes this. Not that they aren't going to
keep getting and using software patents, but they're going to have to
use them little enough that they're not seen as essential to the
company's success.
Any of the compatibility news is about Linux on the desktop
Microsoft Exchange intermediates human/human interactions in a lot
of companies. And it's infective -- you hire a vice president from an
MSFT Exchange-using company, and he wants you to get it too. It's
social software that matches up to the way that a lot of big cheeses
like to work, which helps it get budgets allocated to it.
Microsoft SharePoint wants to be a human-activity-intermediating,
infectious software product like its older brother. So, just like MSFT
Exchange will let your Firefox users point a browser at it, SharePoint
doesn't want the rare, financially insignificant desktop Linux users to
be deal-breakers. Easier to sell Corporate IT on setting up those Linux
mutants with SharePoint client support than selling Corporate IT on
making the desktop Linux users switch to Windows Vista or something.
Of course, SharePoint -- a power user of the same Office XML as MSFT
Office -- is agressively, unilaterally driving opening up access to
Office XML, Novell deal or no Novell deal. So Novell didn't need to do
the deal anyway.
Sticking with Novell is fine
Reasonable as many aspects of the deal are from a quarter-to-quarter
basis, if Microsoft gets an ongoing royalty for vague patent threats,
you end up with a cartelized software industry. Instead of a spectrum
of companies at all sizes, you get "hobbyists" and "cartel members". So
the advice to stay away from doing business with Novell for now is
still good. You don't have to drop them like a hot rock, but moving
away should be a priority. Technology that has touched Novell in some
way is not necessarily tainted, though, thanks to the good intentions
of the real people there. So feel free to use it once it has passed
through the filter of some trustworthy license checkers such as the
invaluable nitpickers on debian-legal -- a role that we need more than
ever these days. Debian and Gentoo both have social contracts and
governance structures that make them resistant to "Novellization", so
they're good places for migrators to look.
Source
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