RIP
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jsusanka Nov 23, 2010 12:09 AM EDT |
RIP Novell. Lets hope SUSE get bought by someone who can actually create value. |
| tuxchick Nov 23, 2010 1:22 AM EDT |
Shouldn't we be going all peepants berserk, and wailing how this is The Death of Linux? |
| tracyanne Nov 23, 2010 1:27 AM EDT |
@TC, tomorrow. |
| Steven_Rosenber Nov 23, 2010 1:29 AM EDT |
I keep wondering when they're just going to brand it Microsoft Linux and be done with that. |
| djohnston Nov 23, 2010 1:58 AM EDT |
The cloud is falling! The cloud is falling! |
| montezuma Nov 23, 2010 9:40 AM EDT |
Does Novell own any licenses/IP that Microsoft can exploit in a ramped up version of the SCO saga? |
| dinotrac Nov 23, 2010 10:13 AM EDT |
I thought the whole point behind Groklaw/SCO/The Sky is Falling (not), etc was that Linux doesn't infringe anybody's IP. If so -- Tain't no need to worry. There are mighty big players out there relying on Linux. Microsoft is but a gnat against the aggregate. |
| JaseP Nov 23, 2010 10:25 AM EDT |
@ dinotrac My sentiments exactly. And as a lawyer (but not a member of the patent bar), my opinion is that M$ would have all sorts of difficulties using anything they acquire aggressively (prior art, laches, etc.). |
| caitlyn Nov 23, 2010 10:34 AM EDT |
Microsoft is already patent trolling as part of their assault on Android. It seems perfectly reasonable to me they may try the same against Linux as a whole. Before anyone panics as tc suggests I'll point out that for most of us the whole SCO debacle had no effect whatsoever on our computing experience, either at work or at home. |
| gus3 Nov 23, 2010 10:57 AM EDT |
@JaseP: I'm a member of a liquor bar. Does that make me a lawyer? |
| TxtEdMacs Nov 23, 2010 11:34 AM EDT |
Quoting: [...] [as] a member of a liquor bar. Does that make me a lawyer?Depends. After consumption do you hang over the bar or just lie beneath it in a drunken stupor? If it's the former, I hereby admit you to the Bar. However, if it's the latter, which I suspect is true, I will recommend a week in the slammer for disorderly conduct and a life time ban from any Bar. So It Shall Be Ordered. YBT |
| dinotrac Nov 23, 2010 11:41 AM EDT |
@gus3 - May not make you a lawyer, but certainly puts you in the company of many. |
| KernelShepard Nov 23, 2010 11:42 AM EDT |
Unfortunately Novell has some extremely potent patents that could be used against Linux (or anyone else). Google or Red Hat should have done their due diligence in bidding for those patents to stop MS from getting them. Oh well. I guess they'll just have to learn the hard way :- |
| dinotrac Nov 23, 2010 11:56 AM EDT |
@KS - Why do you presume that Red Hat and Google didn't do their due diligence. Frankly, I'd believe they did an adequate job more readily than I'd believe your claim to the contrary. |
| KernelShepard Nov 23, 2010 10:20 PM EDT |
dinotrac: You are perhaps right, perhaps MS just outbid them. I just would have thought they'd have fought harder to get them knowing MS could potentially cause them a lot of problems with those patents. Then again, since Microsoft was already licensing those patents, they might not have been effective for defensive purposes to GOOG / RHT for the next year or so (depending on whether or not buying them would have changed the licensing deal MS had with Novell). Still, I would imagine they'd be beneficial in protection against companies like ORCL. |
| JaseP Nov 24, 2010 4:02 AM EDT |
@KS I really don't think that Novell's patent portfolio is that potent. After all, they were a Linux distributor. Part of the GPL v2 is an implied patent license. Since SuSE put their code in the GPL code base, nothing that they contributed or distributed could constitute a cause of action by the new patent holder. Now that I think about it more and more, we've never seen M$ take a frontal assault against Linux, for anything other than a cross-license agreement on a handful of patents. They could essentially incorporate anything they have acquired into Windoze. |
| dinotrac Nov 24, 2010 7:40 AM EDT |
@KS - Maybe, and it is possible that they've gotten caught flat-footed, but... Lots of lawyers on staff and on retainer, not to mention lots of high-quality geeks fully competent to help those lawyers make sense of the technical bits. I would bet they're either not concerned about the patents or figure it makes more sense to draw a line in the sand and say "Sue me". |
| KernelShepard Nov 24, 2010 9:21 AM EDT |
JaseP: I'm not so sure the "implied" patent grant in GPLv2 will actually hold in court - even Eben Moglen doesn't think it would. Also keep in mind that Novell didn't ship *everything* under GPL. As far as the Novell patents, well, you'd be quit wrong. Microsoft paid Novell something like ~$350 million (I believe it was ~450 million but they expected to get back roughly $100 mil from Novell) back in 2006 to cover their customer's butts. Now they purchase a bunch of Novell's patents for $450 million, spending a total of at least $800 million. That's a hell of a lot of money for "impotent" patents. Obviously most of those patents have probably never been tested in court (obviously some have - as bigg pointed out in another thread, Novell sued MS a while back and collected a vast sum of money), so some *might* be impotent, but Microsoft obviously thinks they're worth paying big bucks for. |
| jdixon Nov 24, 2010 10:55 AM EDT |
> ...we've never seen M$ take a frontal assault against Linux And I doubt we will, as that would garner antitrust scrutiny. There's a reason the patents were purchased by CPTN Holdings LLC rather than Microsoft themselves. |
| dinotrac Nov 24, 2010 12:00 PM EDT |
@guys: Let's not forget that Novell was a technology company earning patents and competing with Microsoft long before it purchased SuSE. It's entirely possible that Microsoft wanted those patents - or, at least, some of them -- for defensive, rather than offensive, reasons. |
| JaseP Nov 24, 2010 4:05 PM EDT |
@KernelShepard: You fail to consider two things in this, first the "payolla" to make the WordPerfect suit go away & the litigation value of the patents, despite being dubious. M$ used the Fat32 patent a number of times, besides it being questionable & actually overturned once, administratively. The value of each is just under the ~$6M in costs per patent suit they could expect to bring/defend (assuming they are used one or more times, not to mention the suits that settle before even being filed). That means they got them @ roughly 50¢ on the $. That means roughly 350-400 cross-license deals (over the duration of their viability) will mean they paid for themselves. And this doesn't even consider cost of the settlement of the WP suit. |
| herzeleid Nov 24, 2010 4:49 PM EDT |
@dino - The merits of the case are beside the point, if and when microsoft orchestrates son of sco. The sco case never had any merit, but it had a chilling effect on linux deployment nonetheless. I speak as someone who worked at a certain fortune 100 company who got "the sco letter", and the lawyers went into duck and cover mode - linux deployments here were annoyingly put on hold over "legal concerns" and it wasn't until the last year or so that we've started advancing again here. I fear that another such lawsuit would, even if it were baseless, have a similar inhibiting effect. |
| jsusanka Nov 24, 2010 7:00 PM EDT |
"> ...we've never seen M$ take a frontal assault against Linux And I doubt we will, as that would garner antitrust scrutiny. There's a reason the patents were purchased by CPTN Holdings LLC rather than Microsoft themselves." you know I think we are seeing this full frontal assault. they are doing the same thing except they are going through "Business Partners" wink wink. maybe the doj needs to adjust their investigation and start looking at these purchases by their business partners (maybe if their partners aren't helping get rid of Linux microsoft is threatening them just the way they threaten pc hardware vendors with preloading windows on their hardware). one of the latest ones I can think of is xen by Citrix. What has that resulted in? xen being deprecated from the major Linux distributions. I just hope SuSE isn't deprecated from existence like xen is from the distributions. That is why I hope SuSE is bought by someone who can bring it back to life and the state to where it was before it was bought by novel. Novell did nothing to SuSE but basically made a mess of it just like they did with everything else they touched. I remember when you could buy corel Linux in target and then microsoft bought corel or made some deal by giving them cash and corel linux was no more. These are just two examples and I think the DOJ needs to step in now. I mean that LLC was started by Microsoft so you have a direct link there in my book. Just watch if they don't sell SuSE off it will die off like corel Linux. |
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