Patent Protection
Lots of talk about the Novell+Microsoft agreement. I don’t have much to say, but wanted to post something.
From the Microsoft Press Release:
Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.
I find this particularly disturbing, considering that all of the compatibility problems between Windows and Linux are caused by proprietary Microsoft technologies. These technologies, such as NTFS, CIFS, UPNP, etc., basically have to be reverse-engineered by the linux community to enable any interoperability at all. Patents, the DMCA, etc. are a big problem in this space. An agreement not to sue a small set of the linux world is not a substitute for true open standards.
All of the applications used to interop with Microsoft/Windows (Samba, OpenOffice, Mono, etc.) are developed by the open-source community. So far, Microsoft has given next to nothing back, and I cannot help but feel that this agreement is very unbalanced.
A few other points of interest:
Our business has always been based on open standards and interoperability.
Open standards create interoperability everyone can implement. That’s the real solution. It doesn’t require a deal between two companies.
Microsoft is claiming it has rights to Linux, that some vaguely defined IP rights are being infringed. So did SCO. That doesn’t make it true.
Categorized as Open Source, Technology
I think this is a very smart business decision on Novell’s part. Basically they’re saying to customers choosing from various Linux distributions: if you want to use Linux and Windows together then Suse is the best choice for you since we can guarantee that we can develop interoperability without worrying about IP concerns. Something that no other Linux vendor can say. RedHat’s response is kin to saying the opposite: if you’re using Linux and Windows together then we don’t care about you – you should be using open standards anyway…
Here here !