"It also calls for Microsoft to pay Novell US$440 million for coupons entitling users to a year's worth of maintenance and support on SUSE Linux to its customers."
"A key element of the agreement now appears to be Novell's US$40 million payment to Microsoft in exchange for the latter company's pledge not to sue SUSE Linux users over possible patent violations."
Ballmer wants money from you??
So MS pays $440 million in exchange for Novel paying just $40 million. Maybe my math is just bad but I don't get it.
Originally posted by: Smilin
"It also calls for Microsoft to pay Novell US$440 million for coupons entitling users to a year's worth of maintenance and support on SUSE Linux to its customers."
"A key element of the agreement now appears to be Novell's US$40 million payment to Microsoft in exchange for the latter company's pledge not to sue SUSE Linux users over possible patent violations."
Ballmer wants money from you??
So MS pays $440 million in exchange for Novel paying just $40 million. Maybe my math is just bad but I don't get it.
It's not about what amount Novell is paying Microsoft. It's about setting up a precedent that linux distros need to pay Microsoft for use of IP:
That's not how the patent system works with software.
'IP' is meaningless term. What do you mean? Trademarks? Copyrights? Patents? Trade Secrets?
Most of them are pretty easy to avoid.
Trade secrets? Don't violate NDAs. Don't violate contracts and licensing.
Copyrights? Don't look at code you can't use. Reverse engineer what you need or use clean room implimentations so there is no possible way for containimation.
TradeMarks? Don't try to make your program pretend to be something it's not or from other people. Don't take other people's artwork and icons. Don't mislabel stuff.
But software Patents? Forget it. There is nothing you can do.
It's not 'IF' your violating patent, it's that you 'ARE'. Weither or not somebody decides to sue you over it is another matter. In all actuality the best thing you can do is ignore it and get your own patents so you can counter sue.
Imagine it's like dice rolls. You got two dice and everytime you roll a four you violate a patent, but you need to hire a dozen lawyers with programming experiance to tell you what the dice say and their best guess is going to be only accurate a minority of the time.
What Microsoft is doing is the FUD game here.
They are going to tell you that they have patents being violated. They use the term 'IP' because it confuses people more. But they aren't going to tell you what patents.
They have to be carefull though because if you know that people are violating your patents and you just let them get away with it you will loose your ability to collect damages and licensing fees in court. What then the best you can generally do is get them to stop releasing the software untill they work around your patent or start paying for licensing.
Otherwise as far as violating Microsoft's copyrights or trade secrets or whatever then the whole Linux community can just generally tell them to F-off.
Originally posted by: Smilin
"It also calls for Microsoft to pay Novell US$440 million for coupons entitling users to a year's worth of maintenance and support on SUSE Linux to its customers."
"A key element of the agreement now appears to be Novell's US$40 million payment to Microsoft in exchange for the latter company's pledge not to sue SUSE Linux users over possible patent violations."
Ballmer wants money from you??
So MS pays $440 million in exchange for Novel paying just $40 million. Maybe my math is just bad but I don't get it.
You missed a paragraph.
Extortion (wikipedia)
I haven't made my mind up yet, but right now it's looking like Novell is joining Redhat and IBM as companies that are FLOSS poison. Eating away at the community and ideals from the inside. mmmm cancer-a-licious!
I don't know how you can say Redhat is poison. They open source and GPL pretty much everything they do.
As far as IBM goes I trust them just about as far as I can throw a s/370 cpu box. Novell's management is pro-software patent/IP type people anyways, this agreement with Microsoft wasn't realy much of a suprise. It's what every large corporation does if they want to survive in the current ecosystem created by the U.S. patent system.
Their biggest mistake is making it sound like what they did was a good thing.
As far as IBM goes I trust them just about as far as I can throw a s/370 cpu box. Novell's management is pro-software patent/IP type people anyways, this agreement with Microsoft wasn't realy much of a suprise. It's what every large corporation does if they want to survive in the current ecosystem created by the U.S. patent system.
Their biggest mistake is making it sound like what they did was a good thing.
Well Redhat isn't in charge of that. It's somebody else's ball and they are playing along. Also if you have been following along there are people involved that are working on free firmware replacements to replace propriatory non-redistributable firmware stuff on a couple of the devices, but I don't remember exactly what right now or if RH is involved with that.
But as far as things like GFS, Netscape directory services, and other craploads of software they've aquired or developed they open sourced it when they didn't realy have to. That sort of thing they did at considurable expense to themselves, upwards to several million dollars worth of software in propriatory terms. Of course they plan on benifiting from it themselves, but that's just normal and healthy thing.
It's quite a bit different from IBM or much of what Oracle is doing were you improve on the free software in order to have a more attractive OS to run their propriatory offerings and compete more effectively against Windows. Which isn't horrible, it's just less good. (we end up with things like Eclipse which some people considure to be superior to Visual Studio, which isn't bad)
I think the only thing that they realy kept propriatory would probably be the RHN which you use with up2date (which is GPL'd) to update your Redhat machines. I think though with Redhat 5 they will replace that with yum. (which although isn't the best, it's better then rhn I think)
But as far as things like GFS, Netscape directory services, and other craploads of software they've aquired or developed they open sourced it when they didn't realy have to. That sort of thing they did at considurable expense to themselves, upwards to several million dollars worth of software in propriatory terms. Of course they plan on benifiting from it themselves, but that's just normal and healthy thing.
It's quite a bit different from IBM or much of what Oracle is doing were you improve on the free software in order to have a more attractive OS to run their propriatory offerings and compete more effectively against Windows. Which isn't horrible, it's just less good. (we end up with things like Eclipse which some people considure to be superior to Visual Studio, which isn't bad)
I think the only thing that they realy kept propriatory would probably be the RHN which you use with up2date (which is GPL'd) to update your Redhat machines. I think though with Redhat 5 they will replace that with yum. (which although isn't the best, it's better then rhn I think)
Redhat is continuing their partnership with the OLPC and promoting it as a project with open source goals (not the number 1 goal, I know) despite the fact the project is bending over to corporations allowing them to keep the hardware we buy a secret.
It doesn't matter how much good they've done, when they turn around and attack the community from the inside.
RHN is a service, IMO, not something that needs to be open. Hell, I don't mind closed software, as long as it isn't necessary to have a workable machine. For these laptops to work they need drivers written under NDA. If I wanted to port another operating system over to them I would have to sign an NDA. How free is that? If I wanted to modify the driver, I would have to sign an NDA so I could find out the necessary information about the hardware. That goes against the spirit of free software.
RH and other companies like this want to tell us they're free software/open source software companies, all the while pissing on our faces.
Originally posted by: M00T
Originally posted by: Smilin
"It also calls for Microsoft to pay Novell US$440 million for coupons entitling users to a year's worth of maintenance and support on SUSE Linux to its customers."
"A key element of the agreement now appears to be Novell's US$40 million payment to Microsoft in exchange for the latter company's pledge not to sue SUSE Linux users over possible patent violations."
Ballmer wants money from you??
So MS pays $440 million in exchange for Novel paying just $40 million. Maybe my math is just bad but I don't get it.
You missed a paragraph.
Extortion (wikipedia)
Extortion huh? That's quite a stretch. Here, have a cookie.
Car analogy time. So SUSE steals MS' car. Both parties know it. Instead of pressing charges and suing for damage, MS says, "tell you want, you can just pay me the cost and keep it". That way you and your buddies can drive it around and not get worried about being pulled over and thrown in jail.
SUSE wouldn't sign up for your so-called extortion if they weren't concerned about being sued. They know better than us if they have a stolen car in their garage or not.
Nobody stole anything.
You don't have to 'steal' code to violate software patents. It doesn't have anything to do with ownership or theft or anything remotely like that. Your thinking of copyrights.
That's not how software patents work.
You patent at paticular solution to a paticular problem and patent it.
If somebody else thinks of the similar solution and uses it in their program completely seperate and without any knowledge of the patent or your software or your very existance or existance of your program.. you can still easily sue them successfully.
Software patent is your given a exclusive monopoly over a specific concept. It's irrelevent to wether they 'stole' anything or not. That's not how it works.
I don't disagree with you drag. Car analogies always break down.
I guess it would be more like, "you designed and built a car with the same features as MS" instead of "you stole MS car".
My actual point was: Defending yourself in a court of law isn't extortion. Nor is making a deal before it goes to court.
I guess it would be more like, "you designed and built a car with the same features as MS" instead of "you stole MS car".
My actual point was: Defending yourself in a court of law isn't extortion. Nor is making a deal before it goes to court.
Well it's more like:
"Your car has three hundred thousand individual peices and out of those a unknown number may happen to have slightly more then a passing resembalance to some car peice that Microsoft happenned to think of 5 years ago and Microsoft says they won't sue you for it if you pay them a few million dollars".
It doesn't even matter if Microsoft used those features in it's software or anything like that, that's irrelevent. It may only matter when assessing damages after a successfull lawsuit, but that is irrelevent also because the simple act of engaging in a lawsuit is enough to banckrupt 95% of the software companies and programmers in this country, even if they win.
The whole software patent thing is a sickness. It's just another significant reason why it's less and less economically feasible to create software in the United States. It's BS like this why pretty soon all significant innovation is going to happen in places like Europe or China were this stuff is not in effect. It's just very irritating.
I read comments on places like Digg.com and slashdot and it's obvious that most people have no clue how these things work.
"Your car has three hundred thousand individual peices and out of those a unknown number may happen to have slightly more then a passing resembalance to some car peice that Microsoft happenned to think of 5 years ago and Microsoft says they won't sue you for it if you pay them a few million dollars".
It doesn't even matter if Microsoft used those features in it's software or anything like that, that's irrelevent. It may only matter when assessing damages after a successfull lawsuit, but that is irrelevent also because the simple act of engaging in a lawsuit is enough to banckrupt 95% of the software companies and programmers in this country, even if they win.
The whole software patent thing is a sickness. It's just another significant reason why it's less and less economically feasible to create software in the United States. It's BS like this why pretty soon all significant innovation is going to happen in places like Europe or China were this stuff is not in effect. It's just very irritating.
I read comments on places like Digg.com and slashdot and it's obvious that most people have no clue how these things work.
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