Of course the net is buzzing with reactions to the Novell-Microsoft agreement of yesterday. Bruce Perens is very negative about it all: "What aren't they telling you? First, you can be sure that Microsoft's not out to help a competitor. This announcement paves the way for Microsoft to implement significant control over commercial customer's use of Free Software. And it has significant negative implications for Open Source in general." Eben Moglen of the FSF says about the possible GPL issues: "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."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Here is Miguel's take on it as a Novell VP
That was a highly amusing read:
"So today we have secured a peace of mind for Novell customers that might have been worried about possible patent infringements open source deployments. This matters in particular for Mono, because for a long time its been the favorite conversation starter for folks that find dates on Slashdot."
Which confirms that Mono did have patent issues, otherwise why bother with this agreement? And what happens to all those people using and developing for and with Mono on non-Suse distributions? Is that Novell saying "You're not covered and Microsoft can do what they like?" That's effectively what they're saying.
And Office XML:
"At one stage there around 1/2 the open 'issues' wrt. improving disclosure (and hence the spec.) came from Jody. I for one am proud of the job that he did there, an (ongoing) investment that will yield better interoperability for years to come."
Typical silly optimism about trying to get around the problems of Microsoft Office compatibility. What Microsoft gets out of this is that those who would have used ODF will now use OpenXML through Open Office, and over a period of years Microsoft will slowly throttle that support. It's success in Open Office is entirely dependant on how nice Microsoft is, and Microsoft does not want people using Open Office who should be buying Microsoft Office.
From Michael Meeks' blog:
"To re-emphasise this, the value in OpenOffice.org is not what file format it supports (eg. we want to add good Lotus Word Pro support) but that it is truly Free software, that gives people critical Freedoms. An open format is anyhow implicit in the native file format of any openly developed Free software project."
Right. So what happens when Microsoft carefully controls that OpenXML standard, adds stuff that you can only do through Office and carefully reigns in the licensing of OfficeXML? What Michael Meeks is saying there is that ODF is dead as far as they are concerned because they want and need to have better interoperability with Microsoft Office - and they believe Microsoft will simply allow them.
Even better, Novell are thoroughly endorsing a standard that MA had explicitly rejected as a candidate standard for various reasons they had stated.
Gee, thanks Novell. You really get it!
Member since:2005-07-27
Which confirms that Mono did have patent issues, otherwise why bother with this agreement? And what happens to all those people using and developing for and with Mono on non-Suse distributions? Is that Novell saying "You're not covered and Microsoft can do what they like?" That's effectively what they're saying.
Any piece of interesting software, anything above 100 lines of code is likely going to infringe on a patent someone owns. The chances that software infringes on Microsoft patents are high.
Anywhere you pick in any operating system a patent is probably being infringed, because fundamentally, software patents are broken.
The collaboration agreement between Novell and Microsoft covers all the software that we sell and all the software that Microsoft sells. They dont sue our customers, we dont sue theirs.
To some people, this was a big concern for adopting our software (and as you pride yourself in pointing out), Mono is not a major technology yet. From an economic standpoint, the big revenue killers today for Microsoft is the LAMP stack. Today Mono is a blimp on the radar, but thanks to people like you, that have focused on using Mono as their punching bag Mono is strongly associated with patents, while from a business standpoint what matters the most is what is actually driving revenue.
Anyways, the point is that this agreement allows Novell to sell Linux to a sector of users that would not have adopted it due to this concerns.
There is nothing in this agreement that changes things for those that did not care in the first place, but it is a selling point for those people that did care.
Right. So what happens when Microsoft carefully controls that OpenXML standard, adds stuff that you can only do through Office and carefully reigns in the licensing of OfficeXML? What Michael Meeks is saying there is that ODF is dead as far as they are concerned because they want and need to have better interoperability with Microsoft Office - and they believe Microsoft will simply allow them.
That is not what Michael Meeks said, as usual, your posting technique is limited to attributing to others things that are not there.
You have done it in the past; You did it with the customer covenant on this thread; and you are doing it with Michael.
Typical.
Miguel.
Member since:
2005-11-02
Here is Miguel's take on it as a Novell VP
http://tirania.org/blog/
Edited to point out that his blog contains the following disclaimer:
"This is a personal web page. Things said here do not represent the position of my employer."
Though I think that's there primarily for his political comments.
Edited 2006-11-03 18:09