Submitted by Turbolinux has followed Novell, Linspire, and Xandros in signing a patent and technology agreement with Microsoft. “In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies’ patent portfolios.”
…another one bites the dust.
Soon Dick Cheney…..I mean, Steve Ballmer, will rule them all……muwaaahahahaa!
Sad. I wouldn’t sign such an agreement unless I was able to know which patents I’m violating, if any.
Edit: fixed typo.
Edited 2007-10-24 20:58
Agree, but then you might tell MS to go f**k itself if you did know.
And, like in many areas, they aren’t really “rational” or “fair” 🙁
To be fair, businesses are rational in that they understand that customers are not.
The Turbolinux CEO “characterized the deal as a way to help his customers perceive Turbolinux as ‘the distribution that works best with their existing Microsoft investments'”.
Notice there is no attempt to help his customers understand anything about his product and its relationship with Microsoft products. It’s all about perception. It’s quite rational to model a market as a set of unconscious desires that must be satisfied by beliefs.
If you do a survey about consumer product preferences or poll on voter interests, you get a completely different picture than the one you get from analyzing consumer behavior or electoral outcomes. People don’t buy products or vote for politicians according to their preferences and interests but rather according to their beliefs and emotions.
People can be classified according to what drives their underlying desires. There’s the conformer that wants to fit in, the aspirer that wants to be somebody, the succeeder that wants to compete to win, and the reformer that wants to change the world.
I’m a reformer, and I imagine that most people opposed to these cross-licensing deals reject them on the grounds that they represent problems with the patent system rather than the elimination of barriers to Linux adoption.
However, short of reforming a broken patent system, more people would aspire to be a Linux user if it were more interoperable, and more would succeed through using Linux if it were less vulnerable to legal suits. Rational or not, these subtle perceptions are getting in the way of the aspirations and ambitions of prospective customers, and the vendors are conscious of these desires.
Could they be fulfilled through other means such as Red Hat’s patent indemnification policy? Yes. But perhaps the executives at Turbolinux, especially given their Asian culture, are conformers, seeking to fit in by mimicking the most prominent response to these problems.
More boxes install linux, more pressure from Dark Side. Can not imagine what MS can do when linux close to 30%, hire assassins that will kill *nix users ?
Sure, what do you think nixing people means…?!
I read the comments here as amusement. You can tell that most of you have never own a business, or understand the business world.
Like someone said in another subject. Companies do not hold personal grudges, like all the fans of whatever OS you favor do. What companies do is get the best deal for themselves. If A sell me a product cheaper than B, but B is my friend, I still buy from A. Boys, that’s business.
This was funny. A couple years back, some Sun programmers wanted to make a product that they were working on, open source and free. I guess they were wide eye utopians. Their manager had to bring them back to reality and told them, and who is going to pay you them? They all decided to shelved their bright idea. Most of you are like those programmers, sheeps without common sense!
Companies do not hold personal grudges.
But the people who run the companies can and sometimes do.
What companies do is get the best deal for themselves.
Under ideal circumstances only. As a for instance, what has SCO as a company gained from the ongoing multi-year long law suite with IBM over Unix/Linux copyright violations? Answer, jack squat. Darl certainly was acting in someones interests, but they were not that of SCO.
I understand the business world, and I don’t like most of what I see.
This was funny. A couple years back, some Sun programmers wanted to make a product that they were working on, open source and free. I guess they were wide eye utopians. Their manager had to bring them back to reality and told them, and who is going to pay you them? They all decided to shelved their bright idea. Most of you are like those programmers, sheeps without common sense!
Huh?
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/
No further comment.
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First, two comments:
1. No community is of a piece. Glancing over this and your previous posts, I can’t help but notice that you have a very “you people” attitude. Most any community is heterogeneous. It might behoove you to consider that.
2. If your goal is to persuade “us people” that you are right, you need to work on your technique. Openly insulting your target for persuasion is exceedingly ill-advised. It almost guarantees that you will not be listened to.
That said, I might actually agree with you to an extent. But I can’t help but want to distance myself from you a bit.
Please take this post in the constructive spirit in which it is intended.
Oh, and you might want to provide more detail and/or evidence regarding your Sun example. Without concrete details you might as well have started it out with “Once upon a time…”.
Unless C, with the most expensive product, gives you a kickback. *That’s* business.
hahaha – funniest news all day, a company distributing free software paying another company not to sue them.
Just a thought……
Looking at some of the MS similar features in some distro’s, like the main menu’s and even the minimize/maximize/close buttons located in the same place on most windows in Linux, I’m just wondering if these are some of the patent’s that MS is actually referring to.
Even referring to a ‘window’ in Linux would probably be enough for MS. Heck, they own that too!
I’m really scared about this news…
What will happen when all of this linux vendors try to share code with others like Red Hat or Mandriva?
Would it be possible or the MS deal will make it not possible?