Microsoft/Novell

[Alex Beamish]

On 11/7/06, John McGregor <mr.mcgregor-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> Much has been made here and elsewhere about the doomsday pact that
> Novell made with Microsoft and how it bodes evil for Linux in general.
> However, I have the gut feeling that Novell and only Novell found itself
> in the deep shit. Today I came across this press announcement on Linux
> World for Suse Enterprise Server 10 (originally publishedat
> approximately the same time as Novell states the negotiations with
> Microsoft began). Here is a selected quote form the article that is
> particularly telling:
>
> "The company also announced the Open Workspace Suite, a software package
> which includes GroupWise collaboration, ZENworks and Open Enterprise
> Server. Users of the Novell Open Workspace Suite can deploy either
> Windows XP or SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on their workstations or
> laptops.'
>
> My bet is that this goes way beyond Samba and getting it to work
> required that Novell go wading in the Microsoft minefield. In the
> process, Novell gave Baldy, whose favourite hobby is spewing
> vituperative fud, enough ammunition to keep him happy for a long time.
> For the rest of us, simply avoiding Novell's solution (like the plague
> it is) will keep us well away from Microsoft's designs.


As any SCO product has been ignored since The SCO Group launched their
ill-fated lawsuit against IBM (and others), so will SuSE now be ignored. It
will be interesting to see how the stats on distrowatch.com stack up on that
distro.

Of course, it won't be ignored by everyone, and probably not by big
Microsoft customers who want a Linux distro, but certainly it will be by the
hobbyists, who have so many options to choose from.

Microsoft's strategy of threatening lawsuits might have worked four years
ago, but with the SCO/IBM case winding down, I believe that Microsoft is
going to have a tough slog of it.

The best that they can hope for is that some ridiculously obvious software
patents are found in either GNU or in the kernel. Two things will happen:
everyone who is using GNU/Linux will communicate their displeasure with
Microsoft, and the Mother of all hackathons will take place to replace the
offending code.

It may not be easy sailing by any means, but I really don't think Microsoft
still has the leverage to do any real damage to those who use GNU/Linux.

And the best result would be that any suit that Microsoft launches will
prompt the USPTO to get their act together and be made to realize that it's
ridiculous to patent something like FAT, how to make a cursor by inverting
the image at a particular screen location, or one-click shopping (the Amazon
patent).

-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario
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