Novell-Suse acquisition "ripping the legal rug right out from under SCO."

[JoeHill]

Quote:

"Yes, the operating system itself is a commodity, Nugent added, "But the
distribution is not." But if that didn't make it clear, this next statement did:
"By doing this, we can make sure there are no problems with dependencies [in
Novell's application stack] or intellectual property." We were getting warmer.

In talking to customers, Nugent went onto explain, Novell was told over and over
again that there needed to be at least two enterprise Linux offerings (Red Hat
being the other) with the backing of a large global company. I wondered if that
was the message that IBM was getting too. Generally speaking, "backing of a
large global company" equals assurance.

So, let's add this up, against the backdrop of indemnification. We've got two
companies --- IBM and Novell --- both of which have made heavy technology and
marketing investments in Linux and open source (including Novell's recent
acquisition of Ximian). One of the companies (IBM) is the subject of a giant
lawsuit from the company that claims to own the intellectual property rights to
the technology in Linux. The other is a company that, dating back to its
UnixWare days, is rumored to still have just enough Unix intellectual property
rights to be immune to the wrath of SCO. The customers of these two companies
want some assurances, and the CTO of Novell wants to provide them in the way of
solid stack interoperation and issue-free intellectual property rights. Are we
getting warm yet?"

link:

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/novell_suse.html

-- 
JoeHill ++ ICQ # 280779813
Registered Linux user #282046
Homepage: www.orderinchaos.org
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