Red Hat is still doing well, but we continue to discover that Novell’s move was not oblivious to patents threats that could/would ensue. Here is some of the latest.

Novell clarifies $40M payment to Microsoft as ‘peace of mind’

…regardless of what was said behind closed doors, as the deal was signed, in order for Red Hat’s customers to perceive Microsoft threat to sue Linux users as even partially credible, it needs the market to perceive Novell’s $40 million as respect for its patents. Period. Was the timing of Ballmer’s up-ratcheted rhetoric coincidental? You be the judge.

If Novell’s deal is not concerned with patents, then why does Novell wave it as a principal and key selling point, even in a place where software patents are invalid? This makes one wonder if the Open Letter was truthful or simply defensive.

Novell is already marketing its Microsoft deal in the UK. A couple of readers have sent me their UK newsletter, and it’s a pip. They mention the patent aspect of the deal, by the way, prominently.

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Anybody but me see a disjoint between this wording and Novell’s letter to the community? And if you don’t mind my asking one teeny tiny question: Are software patents legal in the UK? The marketing page puts it on the record that Novell is advertising in the UK a product that supposedly has patent benefits and which implies that users of Novell’s products are specifically protected from Microsoft patents.

It is unsurprising that Novell uses its open letters to alleviate doubt which spreads from customer to customer. But is it possible that Novell misuses open letters in the same way that Microsoft has, namely spreading FUD while the opportunity is there?

Over at Blogspot, a list is being assembled which points to mirrors of Novell pages that have miraculously vanished.

• Important Quotes about Linux
• Why Linux is a Better Choice than Windows…
• Things Microsoft Failed to Mention…
• We’ve Reached the Linux Tipping Point…
• It’s all about Choice. Users want choice…
• Why Choose Novell for Linux?…

The removal of these pages cannot be misinterpreted. It’s an implication and sign of Novell’s changing mind, or perhaps consent to censorship applied to truthful facts.

Head over to that blog in order to see all the pages for yourselves (in full, and including hyperlinks which are deliberately omitted above).

Correction: I have just been told that all pages have returned (albeit a few may have been edited), apart from one which includes a comparison with Windows (“Why Linux is a Better Choice than Windows…”).

Slip of one’s mouth or true admission of egocentricity?

John Dragoon, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Novell, based in Provo, Utah, told eWEEK in an interview following the release of the open letter that when a customer is making a decision whether or not to deploy in certain environments and there are impediments to that deployment, whether real or imagined, “It is in Novell’s interest – selfish interest, I will admit – to advance-remove whatever those inhibitors be to the advancement of Linux and open source.”

Companies are entitled to pursue their own interests, but spitting at the community that voluntarily put the foundations is simply unacceptable.

A story from Tectonic (South African tech) shows us that Ubuntu trumps SUSE, even based on purely ‘political’ considerations. Unless Novell retracts its deal with the devil, I am afraid that we are likely to find more stories as such.

SLED 10 is good looking, well designed and very usable. Novell has added some excellent features that make the Gnome desktop just a little bit more friendly to use. Surprisingly, the extra overhead didn’t put too much strain on my lower-end IBM Thinkpad notebook.

The obvious question to ask, however, is how the Novell-Microsoft deal will affect SuSE’s market share, both among the free software community and within the corporate sector.

If I was to hazard a guess I would say that we’ll see significant drop off in the use of SuSE by the free software community. In large part because of the relationship with Microsoft but also because something like Ubuntu is every bit as good a desktop for most users as is SuSE and it has less of the baggage SuSE now has.

On the corporate front it will take time for the deal to play itself out but Novell provides a compelling desktop Linux option in SLED 10 and perhaps together with the assurance of not being sued by Microsoft might well be a good corporate desktop replacement.

For myself, I am sticking with Ubuntu for now.

As for myself, I still run Opensuse at home and at work. I am waiting to see how things develop before I impulsively replace Opensuse with Debian or Fedora Core (just renamed “Fedora”). If it’s not broken, don’t ‘fix’ it, right? Technically, Opensuse is not broken. And yes, the licensing route to the future seems broken already. A couple of weeks ago I noticed the following when doing a whois.net lookup.


Domain Name: FREESUSE.COM
Registrar: BELGIUMDOMAINS, LLC
Whois Server: whois.belgiumdomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.belgiumdomains.com
Name Server: NS-3.WEBSERVERGATOR.COM
Name Server: NS-2.WEBSERVERGATOR.COM
Name Server: NS-1.WEBSERVERGATOR.COM
Status: ACTIVE
EPP Status: ok
Updated Date: 01-Nov-2006
Creation Date: 01-Nov-2006
Expiration Date: 01-Nov-2007


A fork to freedom? Some existing SUSE users would hope so. A willing army of developers and testers may already be prepared to embark on such a project. The endeavour involves maintenance of packages that will evolve elsewhere, in companies that foster innovation and serve as incubators.

Love SuSE/SUSE. Blame Novell.

In the past two days I have stubbornly abstained from silding with this rather extreme perspective, which I perceived as unrealistic. But here we have an opinion piece that earned a place in LinuxToday. Many conservative Linux users appear to see it as reasonable.

Novell will definitely fork any open source software that moves to GPLv3. This is not surprising given that Novell is now being bankrolled by Microsoft. It also appears that Microsoft is willing to fund such forks, in the name of interoperability.

To quote my colleague, “I think it’s realistic, and crazy (on Novell’s part). What this deal is doing, per Microsoft’s terms is saying anyone who wants to hack on the code can, and then give it to Novell only via OpenSuSE.org. Anyone else who redistributes is subject to lawsuit, does Novell really think that the compulsion to code is so great that the community will continue to improve their proprietary code at gunpoint?

The opensuse folks need to leave, en masse, as a signal to Novell that they will need to write their own code (or collaborate with MS) from here on in. Even if they did sidestep GPL2 (which I don’t concede), they will not get around GPL3. This might require a lot of re-writing of code that cannot be relicensed, but maybe that’s the point – to slow down Linux on a massive rewrite so they can catch up with vista 2, since Vista 1 is a trainwreck.”

Another opinion piece from ZDNet Blogs clearly suggests that Red Hat will be able to endure, if not prosper more than ever before. It concludes with the following:

…Oracle may hurt Red Hat, but not nearly as much as you’d think. As for Novell and Microsoft they have their own issues to sort out.

It is encouraging to see that Novell’s mistake hurts its own presence more than it affects other Linux vendors. In fact, judging by all those Linux contracts which are struck so frequently (more latterly the City of Vienna, Dakota, and Nokia), it seems like Novell remains an issue for Eben Moglen to address in GPLv3. In the interim, it’s business as usual for GNU/Linux.

Let Steve Ballmer talk. Let him and Ron Hovspeian continue to “agree to disagree”. When the children are through playing perhaps they can start worrying about their dwindling products again. The only genuine gainer at the moment is (non-SUSE) Linux.