more on SUSE

[Kurt Granroth]

Alan Dayley wrote:
> Now, MS claims Linux/FS/OSS violates their "intellectual property" and
> gets to point at the agreement as "proof" that such violations exist.  A
> big gun in the FUD battle they constantly wage against Linux/FS/OSS.

This is the crux of the argument and it's apparently the part that I'm
far too dense to understand.  There is a giant leap of deduction that D
follows A without going through B and C first.

Okay, so Novell has consistently stated that they agreed to the patent
part only because they couldn't get the deal with Microsoft anyway.  As
far as Novell was concerned, the deal was about some knowledge sharing
about, I believe, virtualization and the patent thing went along because
MS wouldn't make the deal without it.  The CEO of Novell has gone on
record as saying that he didn't particularly care about the patent part
since as far as anybody knows, there are NO patent violations in
GNU/Linux.  So what's the harm in signing such a deal?

Now you don't have to know much about MS to know that they can't
possibly have honorable intentions for insisting on such a patent deal.
 They clearly want to use it to their advantage.  That's a pretty safe
assumption.  MS means great harm to all of OSS and will do what they can
to subvert everything we do.

But here's the part I'm just not seeing: How do we go from that to
saying that this agreement somehow is a "big gun"?  Other quotes I've
seen say it's a betrayal of the Linux community.  How?  If there aren't
any IP issues with Linux, then the patent deal is meaningless to the
Linux community.

I keep thinking that a lot of people in the Linux community are secretly
sure that there *are* patent or IP problems with GNU/Linux and they just
don't want the issue brought up at all.

> Novell gets a few hundred million dollars to keep in operation.  And
> they are already claiming protection from being sued as a selling point
> for their Linux based products.  Novell asked for the above agreements
> not to sue only apply to paying customers of Novell products.  Therefore,
> purchasing a Novell product is tacit approval of the above actions.  If
> you use SUSE, use OpenSUSE and don't pay for it.

All that said, I think the patent part of the deal was a good deal for
Novell.  MS (Ballmer in particular) is definitely spreading a lot of FUD
about how Linux is infringing on so many (completely unspecified)
patents.  Like it or not, this is keeping a lot of people away from
using Linux (obviously MS's goal).  Since one avenue into Linux is
"protected", though, they can safely get into Linux without worrying
about MS chasing them down.  Without the deal, I'm sure that those
people would have chosen some other path... likely with MS.

Now if Novell was licensing specific patents from MS (like for CIFS or
SMB) to protect their products than I'd be screaming bloody murder.  But
I haven't yet seen anything to be upset about.

Kurt