Microsoft deal will hurt Novell

by Sam Varghese

Sunday, 19 November 2006

Page 2 of 3 There has been some talk that the deal violates the GPL, the license under which Linux is released. Long-time Linux advocate Nicholas Petrey quotes the attorney for the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, as saying: "If you make an agreement which requires you to pay a royalty to anybody for the right to distribute GPL software, you may not distribute it under the GPL." From all that has been made public, it appears to be a bid by Microsoft to isolate Novell from the rest of the Linux community; Novell will now be pushing its offerings as being free from likely patent problems, a subtle hint that other distributions (hint: Red Hat) may not be free from such encumbrances. There has been a bid by Microsoft to play this down by offering a similar deal to Red Hat but I'm sure that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were pretty sure that Red Hat wouldn't offer to play ball. However, by making such an offer, the two Harvard buddies have ensured that some doubts have already been sowed. This is typical Microsoft - the company has not always been known to play fair and square when it does business deals. The interoperability lab will work to Microsoft's benefit; Novell has always produced better technology than the software factory at Redmond. And as the veteran tech writer Robert X. Cringely points out, this is not exactly a bad time for Microsoft to have an interoperability project going - the company has been given a deadline by the European Union about exactly such issues. Cringely also makes the point that it doesn't exactly hurt to be invoved in this effort with a company that is selling a Linux distribution which is well known in Europe. Until recently, SUSE was the best-selling distribution on the continent. For a long time, Microsoft has been puzzling over the question - how do you wipe out a product that you can't undercut price-wise? It appears that the deal has been done to promote Novell, hit Red Hat's sales, and then pull the rug out from under Novell in the end. As Petreley points out, in the past, Microsoft has signed deals with Sybase, Symantec, Corel, Borland, and Citrix among others - and all of them were discarded once they were considered not to pose any serious competition. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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