Perens continues to fight the good fight

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 22 March 2007 06:55

Opinion and Analysis

Every year, Novell holds its annual tradeshow, which it calls Brainshare, in Salt Lake City, Utah. This year, the company has had a much smaller, but possibly more raucuous, companion, across the street.

 Free software advocate Bruce Perens, one of the two people who founded the open source initiative to bridge the gap between free software and the business community, was out there, continuing his campaign against Novell which he began after the company signed a deal with Microsoft last year.

According to the public part of the deal, Microsoft will pay Novell about $US348 million over five years, around $US240 million of which is for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server "certificates" that Microsoft can resell, distribute or use.

A deal on patents ensures that Novell will get $US108 million from Microsoft for use of Novell's patents. Novell will fork out something in the region of $US40 million annually for five years to Microsoft which has agreed not to raise patent claims against Novell's end-user Linux customers.

Microsoft will dole out $US60 million on joint Linux/Windows marketing, mostly for pushing virtualisation. Redmond is paying $US34 million to push the joint Linux/Windows offering. An interoperability lab is also part of the deal - a group that works to improve the way Linux and Windows work together.

Perens calls this "a protection racket." He made a speech to a small crowd in a little conference room across the street from the Novell tradeshow, stressing that he would have had no objection to Novell - or any other Linux company - signing a technical collaboration deal with Microsoft.