Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Bruce Perens is a staunch supporter of the FOSS movement. One-time leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Project and the primary author of the open source contract, Perens has now launched an online petition asking Novell to recant some of the terms of its deal with Microsoft so that the entire community is not disadvantaged.
Else, he warns, Novell may remain stuck with old versions of several programs which are part and parcel of every Linux distribution as the authors of such programs move to the new GPL licence, version 3, in March next year. The deal which Novell struck with Microsoft would violate the GPLv3.
The Linux kernel is likely to remain under the existing version of the GPL, version 2, as its creator Linus Torvalds, is not inclined to move to the new licence. But several essential programs, such as the GNU C library, are owned by the Free Software Foundation. "The leading developer of that library is a Red Hat employee. It's already been announced that GPL and LGPL 3 will contain terms that make it untenable to use while your patent agreement with Microsoft stands," Perens writes in the petition which is in the form of a letter to Novell head honcho Ron Hovsepian.
Acknowledging that the FOSS community would have had no problem with a strictly financial and technical deal, Perens wrote: "It is abundantly clear that Novell and Microsoft took the time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing covenants to each other's customers, rather than licenses to each other, in order to circumvent Novell's earlier agreement with the community of GPL software developers."
He points out that it is virtually impossible to develop any form of software without infringing on some petty patent or the other. "Let's be truthful about software patents: there can be no non-trivial computer program, either proprietary or Free, that does not use methods that are claimed in software patents currently in force and unlicensed for use in that program. There are simply enough patents, on enough fundamental principles, to make this so. If all software patents were enforced fully, the software industry would grind to a halt."
Around 1600 users, developers and administrators had signed the petition at the time of writing. Many have left their own comments, none of which are very complimentary to Novell. Additionally, many of the signatories have indicated that they will now be looking to Red Hat to fill the gap in their Linux set-up when they stop using Novell's SUSE Linux.
It would be interesting to see what stance the FOSS developers at Novell, who have long been part of the community, adopt. Will they jump ship or will the money speak a language which is stronger than idealism? Perens claims that "there are serious questions regarding how Novell intends to go on with its business. Developers are jumping ship."
In the end, everything will depend on the FSF. The chief mandarin, Richard Stallman, has not yet spoken. The FSF's chief legal eagle, Eben Moglen, has indicated that the GPLv3 will have clauses to prevent such deals being repeated. But money and the prospect of losing a lot of it, will speak much louder than words.
David Bass
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