[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 10:19:07 +0000 Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > At the start of the review you say you don't see the problem with the Novell > Microsoft deal! I'd recommend reading as much of www.groklaw.net as you can > and then you'll see. Its not about wether the GPL has been breached but about > the way M$ presents it. > We all know SCO has no rights over Linux but the court case there has put off > millions from using Linux. The FUD that M$ will generate over the deal will > turn millions more off. Its not the deal thats the problem, its the leverage > it seemingly gives M$. Microsoft has already started that with Steve Bullmer's ludicrous claim that because Novell paid up, every user of GNU/Linux owes Microsoft money! This is along the lines that because one person believes their claims, everyone is at fault. Duh? The threat is clear. SCO are/were small fry - just consider the budget that Microsoft will make available to the inevitable court cases. If this "logic" was applied to other conspiracy theories, NASA would be being sued for lying about sending a man to the moon and it would be illegal to dispute any UFO sighting. "One person has seen it / believes it therefore everyone else is required to believe it and be legally bound by the consequences." Duh? (Scientologists would be pleased. As would JW's. That's not as scary as what would happen if "Bullmer's Law" applied to far Right or far Left organisations. Imagine the havoc if this applied to the BNP or North Korea? That's how ludicrous - and dangerous - Bullmer's claims really are.) > I've been a Suse fan since I installed 5.1 on a 386 with 4 meg of ram and it > ran for many months without a hitch! I've never managed to get SuSE to work with my TFT panel - I suspect a rat by the name of proprietary graphics drivers. I've also had problems where programs developed on Fedora and Debian encounter mysterious bugs in the GNU autotools (autoconf, automake, autoheader) on SuSE that reminded me of similar problems on MacOSX (which is a proprietary OS trying to implement GNU). These things are minor, at the moment, but if Microsoft extend their embrace as they have done before, Novell will find more proprietary hacks drifting into their OS. My concern is that the MS-endorsed SuSE will drift away from compatibility with openSuSE, Fedora, Debian and Mandriva because there will be too many proprietary blobs, making debugging impossible. Distribution-specific bugs can only be solved when the entire distribution source code is available. Any one bug may have tentacles in various systems and you just can't tell sometimes which packages are involved. That may be a blessing in disguise. If the MS-SuSE gets a reputation for being more like Linspire and Xandros than Debian and Fedora, this will harm their interaction with the free software community. It could consign MS-SuSE to a relative backwater (as Linspire found out). This makes talking about freedom even more important - freedom will become the defining difference between MS-SuSE and free distributions. Companies like nvidia will be more likely to support the MS-backed OS as a token (but empty) gesture to the free software lobby. It will become even more important to explain the differences and why MS-SuSE is at best a stepping stone to a genuinely free distribution. Expect each "improvement" in interoperability between MS-SuSE and MS-foo to be scrutinised minutely and pay particular attention to the LICENCE of each code fragment. Just because something works in MS-SuSE, does not now mean that the free software distributions will be able to implement the solution. Auditing code within Fedora, OpenSuSE, Debian (and therefore Ubuntu), Mandriva and Slackware is already routine - it will become even more obvious now. The licence of every patch, every new package inspected and verified. The licence of every MS-SuSE fragment inspected and checked. Even the possibility that wizzo feature incorporates code from MS-SuSE triggering careful provenance checking on each line if necessary. > I program in .NET and the Novell Mono work is fantastic. Then you, and developers like you, are going to have to be particularly careful. Every single time you look at code from another project that may help you in yours, your first question must always be "which licence?". Whether your code is ready for distribution or not - if there is the slightest chance that someone else will learn from or incorporate your code into their project, you have a LEGAL obligation now to be ultra careful in the provenance of your own code. Yes, legal: if infringing code is traced back to you, any infringement could become your problem, at the very least requiring a rewrite of the code to omit the disputed section. I'm quite sure you cannot personally afford to defend against such claims made by a pit of MS vipers (sorry, lawyers) in a US court. > I cannot, in all > conscience, recommend a Novel product to anyone any more as a result of their > money grabbing actions - yes they were entitled to the money but the deal > they accepted to get it is just dumb and they will probably sink as a result > of it - though it will take a while for them to burn up the cash. Agreed. Support the OpenSuSE community instead. http://www.opensuse.org/ > The real tragedy of it is they managed to amass a collection of superb > developers, create a really good distribution and that will all go to waste. Not completely true. 1. A lot of SuSE-specialists are in opensuse. 2. Migration of developers into Novell does not preclude their migration back later. 3. Free software developers are pre-disposed to be intolerant of restrictions and have reduced (not absent) susceptibility to financial penalties / lockins. 4. Even if ex-SuSE developers don't go back to opensuse, the other free distributions will be glad of their assistance. 5. A lot of former SuSE releases are GPL themselves - these are safe. Microsoft and Novell will have to tread carefully to retain these developers and the right to use the SuSE codebase. It reflects other threads here: Freedom is important. Freedom is SO important that it overrides other needs like financial rewards and "corporate loyalty". There are sources of funding available for those who grow uneasy within Microvell and the community at large needs to support opensuse and support other organisations that can, in turn, support those developers who want to flee Microvell but still pay their mortgage. Freedom is not a side-issue, it cannot be ignored as needs dictate. Those who develop free software, like previous releases of SuSE, *care* deeply about free software - otherwise they would have taken jobs with Oracle or Microsoft or Sun. If these guys cared more about pecuniary rewards than freedom, they wouldn't have been SuSE developers in the first place. Microsoft cannot simply throw money at these guys and expect them all to give up their freedoms. > They've put back FLOSS by 2 or 3 years - about 20 years in M$ development > terms. I'm not sure that this should be past tense. The wrangling over this will take decades - Microsoft are past masters at making law suits last a lifetime, just check out their history with the EU. It will be an immense drain on everyone for decades to come. The SCO case has already taken years - just imagine how much money (sorry, how many lawyers) MS can throw at this. We may all have retired by the time any cases actually conclude, which means that any claims against an individual are bound to be settled out of court. No one person can afford to get involved in the lawsuits that will emanate from Microvell. It all depends on just how Microvell resolve incompatibility problems between Winfoo and MS-SuSE. Wherever possible, I suspect MS will rely on the provisions of the Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) that allow linkage with non-free code. This will lead to proprietary or pseudo-open code leaking into MS-SuSE - it's only natural for a commercial operation to do this. It is an acknowledged weakness in the LGPL. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html Libraries and applications that are strictly GPL only will require GPL solutions and it is these projects and patches that interest me particularly because, if the licence is followed properly, the patches can be migrated into the free distributions intact. > Its not good for the computing world. Agreed. The impact depends on four factors: 1. The amount of new code in MS-SuSE that is GPL. 2. The level of support for ex-MS-SuSE developers by the community 3. The success of opensuse. 4. The extent to which the community can persuades users that freedom is imperative. That said, Matt may well be very pleased with all this, in the long run. I see a possibility that the furore could persuade the community to adhere even more closely to FSF principles and seriously consider dropping non-free to make a clear dividing line between the free distributions (OpenSuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, *-BSD) and the non-free like Xandros, Linspire and MS-SuSE. Can someone else comment on RHEL? Where do they fit in now and does anyone know how they may react? -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
Attachment:
pgp18Ma9X50k8.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html