Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 24 May 2007 20:12
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
All guns are blazing in
the land of Linux: Novell and Microsoft’s patent pact is about to be
made public as Novell rejects Microsoft’s Linux patent infringement
allegations while Novell supports the EFF’s Patent Busting project –
it’s full steam ahead!
When Novell decided to do a deal with Microsoft last year, coming to an agreement not to sue each other and work together on ensuring that Novell’s version of Linux played nice with Microsoft’s desktop and server Windows products, the Linux community was shocked, thinking that Novell had sold out to the devil himself.
According to Novell, and Microsoft, using Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise software ensures interoperability between Suse Linux Server and Windows Server products, with both companies promising to support and solve any issues. In addition, users of Novell’s Linux were safe from any Microsoft lawsuits.
Novell says that things have never been better since the Microsoft deal, with US $70m of their last quarter’s revenue of $91m coming from Microsoft alone as big companies see the value in having a version of Linux and Microsoft software that live happily together.
But none of that has swayed the critics, who were equally dismayed when Dell decided to sell Novell’s software soon after announcing the deal to sell Ubuntu Linux to consumers, with
pricing for Dell Ubuntu machines only just announced at prices similar to Windows, although one Windows machine is actually much cheaper!
Novell was also unable to release the patent pact that explained their deal with Microsoft because of a stock options investigation, which led to claims of a cover up – but conspiracists can rest easy – the investigation has ended, with Novell set to file with the SEC at the end of the month – with the patent pact included as attachments to the filing. No doubt this will be poured over by many with a fine tooth comb.
On top of all of that, Microsoft came out with accusations that Linux violated over 42 Microsoft patents (while open source software violates 235 patents), without actually naming any of them, in what many saw as a thinly veiled threat not to use any version of Linux other than those available from Novell.
But Novell doesn’t agree with Microsoft, saying that the agreement “is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property”.
To prove it, Novell has joined the
EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation’s) fight against software patents, an issue which the space tourist and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks even Microsoft will be fighting against in a few years when ‘patent trolls’, companies who don’t write software but hold IP and patents which they use to extract royalties from others causes Microsoft to have trouble writing anything that doesn’t immediately mean a payment for someone else.
Read onto page 2 for the conclusion...
