Novell-Microsoft: Financial Details Revealed
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 8th Nov 2006 11:24 UTC
Novell and Ximian Microsoft will pay Novell USD 348 million up front, but Novell will return USD 200 million of that amount over five years. The specific numbers came in an a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made by Novell late Tuesday. "The financial commitments Microsoft is making as part of this agreement are significant," company CEO Ron Hovsepian said in a statement. In related news, Microsoft has denied that its patent deal with Novell is in breach of the GPL or will automatically spread Microsoft's patent protection to other Linux distributions.
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RE[3]: losing community faith
by IanSVT on Wed 8th Nov 2006 20:17 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: losing community faith"
IanSVT
Member since:
2005-07-06

Well, you see, for the FOSS community, Linux is kinda sorta not the point. The point is ensuring interoperability for all players, so that none can dictate. Linux has just been FOSS's biggest strategic weapon on that front with the possible exception of the Net and/or Firefox. If that changes, we'll have to find another one.

As was mentioned above, edirectory, groupwise, zenworks; all are proprietary and closed source products which Novell has been offering on Suse and Redhat for years. However, you can't run either on Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian. Where was all the uproar about this years ago?

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[4]: losing community faith
by twenex on Wed 8th Nov 2006 20:28 in reply to "RE[3]: losing community faith"
twenex Member since:
2006-04-21

I think you know why there wasn't any: Novell doesn't have much of a history of turning competitors' products against them (or if it does, most people don't know about it). MS certainly does.

It's highly likely that if MS DOES fork Linux, it will be the only vendor to do so - although it may increase the likelihood of others following suit. But even one fork (a la AT&T Unix vs BSD) is one too many in my opinion and, I suspect, in the view of many others. This is precisely the problem with UNIX that Linux was supposed to avoid, and why so many people have been getting on the bandwagon. It's also why so many people are suspicious of the whole MS-novell-fud-licensing("covenant")-patent-lawsuit-thang.

Reply Parent Score: 1