Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Linux Advocates Wary Of Novell-Microsoft Tie

Filed under
SUSE

Novell investors may be cheering the Linux vendor's historic partnership with Microsoft, but Linux advocates had an entirely different reaction, expressing concerns that the deal may hint at future patent lawsuits and possibly even violate Linux's software license.

"Excuse me while I go throw up," wrote Pamela Jones, the editor of the Groklaw.net blog, which tracks legal issues in the free software community. "I gather Microsoft no longer thinks Linux is a cancer or communism. Now it just wants a patent royalty."

Microsoft and Novell agreed Thursday to work together on marketing and development of their respective products and pledged to make it easier for Windows and Novell's Suse Linux to co-exist in the data center.

But, included in that announcement is a patent cross-licensing agreement that is raising concerns. As part of the agreement, Microsoft has said that it will not sue noncommercial Linux developers and users of Suse Linux, but some worry that this move leaves the door open for the company to sue other Linux companies or even Linux users.

"This is actually really bad news," said Bruce Perens, a well-known Linux advocate. "It sets up Microsoft to assert its patents against all commercial open source users. The deal is going to be, 'You have to buy Microsoft-licensed Linux distribution from Novell or there is an implicit threat that Microsoft will assert their patents against you."

Full Story.

A memorable bit of feedback...

...from a Slashdotter.

Hey Novell!
Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
-snuf23

(Yes, that is the line from Batman) Smile

The Novell-Microsoft Agreement: Time to Take a Deep Breath

The Novell execs should write a letter of thanks to Pastor Ted Haggard. His now public walk on the wild side is what's keeping the already infamous deal between Novell and Microsoft off the front page. And just like Pastor Ted, who goes around in public decrying homosexual relationships but allegedly in private has been maintaining one, Novell has been caught in a contradiction. Upon their purchase of the top-tier distribution SuSE, they claimed they saw the light and found their savior in Free and Open Source software. The truth is, they've been negotiating a patent pact with the proprietary devils in Redmond and yesterday, they came out of the closet.

And the Linux Community is not happy.

Full Story.

----
You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.