Moglen: How we'll kill the Microsoft Novell deal
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We'll fight them on the breaches... Interview If Microsoft is aiming for a courtroom collision with the world of free software, it may be disappointed.â¦
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SEATTLE -- Microsoft on Monday took another big step toward putting most of its legal challenges in the rearview mirror. The world&#39;s largest software maker said it will pay rival software maker Novell a $536
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I have no problem with Microsoft operating in a market environment. Given a choice, I am sure many of us would gladly pay for Windows and Office rather than use Linux and Open Office.
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How a simple bug betrays Microsoft's disdain for basic best practice principles
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Like many, I was pretty shocked by the recent Microsoft-EU deal to settle the long-running investigation into interoperability issues.  This was not so much because of the way Microsoft has used every kind of delaying tactic it could before eventually agreeing (for the nth time) to try harder in the future.  My real dismay was provoked by the gap between appearance and reality â a chasm that I think bodes ill for the future of open source. read more
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(InfoWorld) - This year in IT has been anything but dull as industry titans Bill Gates and Scott McNealy prepared to exit stage right, long-time bitter foes Novell and Microsoft cuddled up and Hewlett-Packard saw a spying scandal shred its reputation. There was plenty of commentary to accompany all that activity, so let's check out some of the most quote-worthy artifacts of the past year. Good night and good luck "I'm thrilled not to have to be CEO anymore. That was a temporary thing that I took on about 22 years ago." --Â Scott McNealy on handing overÂ CEO honorsÂ at Sun Microsystems to ponytailed whippersnapper President Jonathan Schwartz. McNealy appeared upbeat despite having failed to fully reverse the company's poor financial performance. "The world has had a tendency to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on me." --Â Bill Gates, claiming he won't be missedÂ all that much as he steps away from his daily chief software architect role at Microsoft come July 2008 to focus on his charity organization. Gates will remain as company chairman "indefinitely." Sure, we love Linux, we just love Windows more "If you want something, I'm still going to tell you [to buy] Windows, Windows, Windows." --Â Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, aiming to "bridge the divide"Â between open-source and proprietary software with a surprise partnership with Novell. Sounds like he hasn't got that whole co-opetition thing straight yet, ditto on what the whole lovefest means for patents, with the vendors differing on their interpretations of what the deal will mean. "I prefer to be an optimist, and will happily take the option that not everybody needs to be enemies." --Â Mr. Maverick himself, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, with his sunny take on Microsoft/Novell, at odds with the disgust voiced by many in the open-source community with the Suse distributor.Â  Could've, would've, should've ... didn't "I understand there is also a written report of the investigation addressed to me and others, but I did not read it. I could have, and I should have." -- Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard's embattled CEO, stating the obvious over his failure to peruse key information describing the company's bizarre attempts to unearth the source who leaked board-level confidences.Â  "If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently." --Â Patricia Dunn, HP's former chairman, testifyingÂ before a U.S. Congress subcommittee about those techniques Hurd didn't bother to look into, which included pretexting. Forced out of HP in the wake of the spy scandal, Dunn continues to maintain the methods were legal. After all, she was assured of their legality by HP's own lawyers.Â  Touching evil "We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil." --Â Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, about the year-long soul-searching process that the company went through before deciding to offer a censored version of its services in China. Google famously espouses the "don't be evil" credo.Â  That competitive spirit "We will compete like gentlemen. We'll come in with swords, not bombs and guns, and fence." --Â Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, describing how the vendor is balancing a desire to stomp all over Microsoft in the small to midsize business (SMB) applications market while simultaneously cuddling up to the Redmond Rampager to make sweet music around their joint Duet product.Â  "This is capitalism; we're competing." --Â Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, giving his spin on why his company is offering "enterprise support" for Red Hat Inc.'s Linux distribution; other than push down Red Hat's share price and potentially put the vendor out of business that is.Â  Telling it like it is "I think my response was 'What idiot dreamed this up?'" --Â Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's chief security officer, in typical blunt manner, remembering her reaction to the company's scheme to brand its databases as "unbreakable."Â  "Anybody [in the Internet space] who wasn't interested in YouTube was either asleep or not being honest." --Â Jonathan Miller, AOL chairman and CEO, regretting that Google, not his company, bought the video-sharing startup. Less than a week later, Miller was out of a job asÂ Time Warner replaced himÂ with veteran television executive Randy Falco. Could the two events, perchance, be related?Â  The batteries and the bees "It's kind of like impregnating someone. It only takes one, so the more of them there are, the more likely that you'll impregnate someone,"" --Â Rick Clancy, a Sony spokesman, indulging in some plain speaking as to how short circuits caused by microscopic metal particles in the vendor's lithium ion batteries led to a handful of laptops catching fire. The result? A series of major recalls of millions of Sony batteries.Â  Waxing poetic "Enterprise search software is so clearly bereft of soul,"Â Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager for Google's enterprise business, on how high-end search needs to take a leaf out of consumer search's book and focus more on the needs of end users.Â  "I think there was a good balance between different hair and beard lengths." --Â Kaj ArnÃ¶, vice president of community relations with MySQL, in a colorful description of the cross-section of attendees at the Free Software Foundation's First International Conference for GPLv3.Â  Slicing off the fat "We had become bloated. It's like middle-age spread. You don't know how it happens, but one day you look down and it's there." --Â Donald MacDonald, vice president and general manager of Intel's digital home group, as he patted his belly, graphically describing the chip giant's attempts to slim down its 100,000-strong work force. Shedding some light under the financial covers "You can talk about the negatives of 4 to 5 percent market share, but it's kind of like being in the ocean. We're on the bottom, so it doesn't matter what the weather is like up top." -- Steve Jobs, Apple Computer CEO, trying to allay shareholders' concerns about his company while suggesting he might have spent a little too much time watching his animation studio Pixar's "Finding Nemo" movie.Â  "What the chief accountant creates is a work of art." --Â Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, defining most financial reporting as less of a historical record and much more of a forecast. Perhaps that's why so many IT companies fell foul of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this year, particularly in relation to past practices around the granting of employee stock options.
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WHAT MICROSOFT DID: Paid $536 million cash to rival Novell Inc. to settle potential antitrust complaints over Microsoft&#39;s alleged actions toward Novell&#39;s Netware operating system, which competes with Windows software.
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Stats show unanimous support for MS deal A jointly sponsored Microsoft and Novell survey purporting strong customer support for the companiesâ controversial alliance looks like back firing on Novell.â¦
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Almost everything that can be said has been said about the latest moves by Microsoft to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about Linux. Countless pundits and analysts have pointed out that Microsoft threats are toothless. Some have noted that Microsoft has singled out Linux and OpenOffice, the biggest threats to its monopoly on operating systems and office suites. Surely Microsoft could claim that the *BSDs infringe on similar patents if not the same ones. But the *BSDs do not pose as great a threat to the company. Others have pointed out that Microsoft would be insane to pull an SCO and sue its own customers. Still others have noted that IBM and/or OIN could respond to a patent war with a massive retaliation in patent infringement claims. I have no doubt that Microsoft has lifted a lot of GPL code (more likely algorithms) for Windows, which would prevent Microsoft from following through with its threats. To do so would require that Microsoft open its own code to scrutiny. The list goes on, and others have covered the angles very well. There is one perspective I haven't yet seen, at least not the way I propose to deal with it. This perspective follows below.
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Asks Supremes not to save changes Microsoft is asking the Supreme Court to strike-out a multi-billion dollar word processing monopoly lawsuit from Novell.â¦
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After $536 million deal, Novell agrees to pull out of the European antitrust case
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Blog: Novell takes a lot of heat for its patent deal with Microsoft, and rightfully so.  But there is much that the company is doing to advance the cause and state of open source in the industry.  In this second installment of the "Open Source @" Series, I talk
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SEATTLE/NEW YORK: Microsoft has said it will pay $536m to Novell to settle an antitrust suit. It also resolved a 10-year dispute with a computer trade group.
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It looks like another case of Microsoft paying off to save legal hassles and possible bigger punishments in the future. Microsoft has reached a settlement worth USD 536 Million with the much in news corporation Novell.
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(InfoWorld) - Novell has published details of its landmark November 2006Â Linux partnership agreements with Microsoft. Novell published on Friday redacted versions of the three agreements it signed with Microsoft in its annual 10K filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, providing the public with itsÂ first detailed lookÂ into a deal that some see as critical to the future of Linux. The 10K filing had been delayed by an internal stock options review at Novell, which was concluded Wednesday. Under the terms of the agreements, Microsoft will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on licensing fees and sales and marketing costs over five years, including $240 million for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates. For its part, Novell has agreed to pay Microsoft a percentage of revenue from open-source products. [ SEE ALSO:Â Microsoft, Novell defend pactÂ | Special Report:Â Microsoft takes aim at open source, LinuxÂ ] Linux advocates are expected to scour the documents for signs of how the agreement may affect Linux and whether anything in it will put Microsoft or Novell inÂ potential violation of the upcoming version 3 of the GNU General Public license (GPL). The GPL is used in licensing many components of the Linux operating system. Open-source advocate Bruce Perens said he would be looking to see exactly what Novell was given through the deal and whether there is any requirement for the Linux vendor to defend Microsoft's patent claims. "What I'm actually looking for is, to what extent was there a violation of faith?" he said. Microsoft has claimedÂ that Linux violates more than 235 of its patents, and because the deal offers patent protection to Novell users, it is seen as potentially driving a wedge in the Linux community. "Novell had a choice here, and Novell's choice was to be in the same boat with the rest of the free software community, or not," Perens said. Based on an initial reading of the documents, Perens said the deal does not appear to provide full patent protection to Linux users. "Novell did not get complete rights regarding Microsoft patents," he said. "For example, office productivity applications are specifically excluded. ... OpenOffice.org is excluded by name, WINE and Open-Xchange are excluded by name," Novell executives declined to be interviewed about the filings. "We've already provided the high-level comments when we announced the deal in November -- around making Linux and Windows work better together, the areas of tech cooperation, the covenants not to sue. All the customer-focus stuff that drove the deal," said Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry, via instant message. "The agreements provide more meat on the bones in support of those objectives." The patent agreement between the two companies seems to make it clear that Novell does not accept any of Microsoft's patent claims. Section 3.4 says, "Nothing in this Agreement shall imply, or be construed as an admission or acknowledgement by a Party, that any Patents of the other Party are infringed, valid or enforceable." Microsoft and Novell say the deal has helped push Linux adoption in the enterprise by promoting interoperability between the two platforms. Contrary to its image as a threat to open source and Linux, Microsoft is the chief source of Linux business for Novell, and the deal between the two companies has been a boon for SUSE Linux, said Justin Steinman, director of marketing for Novell's Linux and Open Platform Solutions, speaking earlier this week. "Microsoft was Novell's number one channel partner in the first quarter of 2007," he said. "We've seen 60 percent (first-quarter) growth in SUSE, year over year." Paul Roberts, a senior editor at InfoWorld, contributed to this story.
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Microsoft has reached legal settlements with two of its biggest adversaries in the software industry, Novell and the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
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NOVEMBER 15, 2004  - Novell Inc. last week filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that Microsoft Corp. illegally tried to eliminate competition in the desktop applications market in the mid-1990s.