Perens continues to fight the good fight

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 22 March 2007 06:55

Opinion and Analysis

What he opposes, he pointed out, was the patent deal which tended to give people the impression that if they did not buy their Linux from Novell then they could face patent lawsuits. And Novell's Linux is no different from that sold by any other Linux vendor.

Perens fears that this patent deal will affect the development of open source software in toto. According to him, software patents have been granted on so many common things, that it is virtually impossible to develop any software without infringing on one patent or another.

A note from the Free Software Foundation executive director, Richard Stallman, was read out by Perens at the beginning of his media conference. Stallman said, in part: "The GPL defends the freedom of all users by blocking the known methods of making free software proprietary. Novell and Microsoft have tried a new method: using Microsoft's patents to give an advantage to Novell customers only. If they get away with scaring users into paying Novell, they will deny users the most basic freedom, freedom zero: the freedom to run the program."

Of course, few if any of the major technology sites have given Perens any oxygen. Steven Vaughan-Nichols is one of the few who have reported Perens' activities comprehensively. But then he generally keeps track of most things which touch Linux in any way.

A couple of community reports aside, Perens has not had much airtime. But there is plenty of material from his conference available at this site.