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Perens Rains on Novell's Parade
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Mar 21, 2007 02:08 PM
from the umbrella-sales-up-five-percent dept.
from the umbrella-sales-up-five-percent dept.
unum15 writes "This week is Novell's Brainshare conference. They are touting the Microsoft covenant not to sue as 'good for consumers'. However, Bruce Perens decided to take this opportunity to 'rain on Novell's parade'. Perens read a statement from RMS affirming the GPLv3 would not allow companies to enter deals like this and continue to offer GPLv3 software. Perens even goes as far as to suggest this move is an exit strategy by Novell. There are also audio and pictures of the event available."
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News: RMS transcript on GPLv3, Novell/MS, Tivo and more 255 comments
H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The 5th international GPLv3 conference was held in Tokyo last week. I've made and published a transcript of Stallman's talk where he described the latest on what GPLv3 will do about the MS/Novell deal, Treacherous Computing, patents, Tivo, and the other changes to the licence. While I was at it, I made a transcript of my talk from the next day where I tried to fill in some info that Richard didn't mention."
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On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it just me, or did Hovsepian intentionally misunderstand that statement? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I read your statement to mean that Novell would effectively become a subsidiary to Microsoft without actually being bought out. Much in the same way that Microsoft "Partners" tend to exist only so long as it amuses Microsoft. When Microsoft grows tired of them, they do something that completely undermines the trust and business model of those partners. (See: PlaysForSure, OS/2, Sybase, Spyglass, Citrix, etc.)
It amazes me that companies still fall for that trick, but there you go. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Bye Novell, it was nice knowing you.
Re:On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget about GPL3 introducing major forks. There will be a few small spats. The license is in the interest of the Open Source developers who would use it, and that's all of the developers who want a share-and-share-alike form of licensing rather than an outright gift as in BSD. The folks who mainly would be opposed to it are those who want to benefit without sharing, and to say the community doesn't need them would be an understatement.
If you believed that GPL3 would prohibit Linux from being used in a system with DRM, you can stop now. There are four places where you can put DRM in a system with a GPL3 kernel and have it work well and not have to give away your keys: in hardware as in a chip that mediates access to the display or audio output, in a coprocessor as with the separate chip that runs the GSM stack in cell phones, in a kernel under the kernel as with Microsoft's "nib", and in a user mode program. Those are also the best places to put the DRM from a technical standpoint. I am currently working on a paper on this, maybe I'll have it out tomorrow evening.
Thanks
Bruce
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Re:On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it wouldn't work this way. In a compliant system, you'd be able to change the kernel as you liked, the system would still boot, but the DRM would still decrypt and play media correctly without offering access to the unencrypted data stream. The key is that the GPL3 DRM terms mean that the DRM must not lock down the GPL program, and the DRM functionality of playing the media must keep working if you change the GPL program. GPL3 does not say that you have to be able to break the DRM, it only restricts what the DRM can break.
This isn't going to keep users away from the program. Users don't generally care about licensing as long as they have a clear right to run the program, and they do. Look at the nasty EULAs they sign from MS, much worse than ours. It may keep certain developers away, but historically the GPL share-and-share-alike terms have helped, rather than hurt, to build a large developer community.
Bruce
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Re:On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Funny)
When the story is about me and my comments get lost in the noise, I really get to think that Slashdot might not value information right from the horse's mouth as much as that from the other end of the horse :-)
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Re:On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
With Novell owning the original Unix IP, Microsoft may then eventually have the upper hand. That's a SCARY thing...
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Re:On Novell being obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Will MS buy them? MS tends to work through proxies these days. Is 330 Million a good starting investment? Sure.
Bruce
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I'm out (Score:3, Interesting)
People hold high expectations on Novell (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's the beauty of Free Software. They can dump Linux and Free Software all they want, if they do, as fast as it takes, a fork for all projects that they are personally involved (Suse, Gnome, Mono, from the top of my head) will pop up and continue almost as nothing has happened.
And I really wish that happens. I don't like the way they are handling Gnome, ignoring completely the community in order to satisfy Novell's aims and goals (mostly, appease to Windows "converted" users. The recent created Gnome Control Panel is a copy of Windows Control Panel, except that it is slow and cluttered like Win 3.11 Program Manager). That, and things like bundling Mono, pfff. But that's another subject, that doesn't belong here.
Just a heads up. Novell has done nothing to deserve your trust. Don't look surprised when they finally misbehave.
That's the problem with Novell. (Score:5, Interesting)
They paid $210 million for SuSE. Why?
The more intelligent approach would be to hire developers who would submit patches that you wanted to the various projects that you're interested in.
Then you Open the protocols that you control that you want to see more widely adopted. And pay developers to incorporate those protocols.
Novell had the idea that it can acquire Linux by buying Linux distributions and projects. When this didn't pay out, Novell decided to "partner" with Microsoft in search of some more money.
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Re:People hold high expectations on Novell (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to disagree with ya there. Sure, they are a commercial company and their goal is to make money. Big Surprise! However, in this effort, they have contributed a substantial amount of code to the kernel, gnome, and numerous other projects. I'm as uneasy about a deal with MS as anyone, but to start bashing them because they are a commercial company and they contribute to Linux is a bit short sighted.
If you do not like, what they have done with gnome, then you can contribute or use KDE, XFCE, twm, etc.
Are you kidding me? Softening the transition (which is an option btw, you can change this), would be a smart move for all linux developers. If we create a completely foreign system, then it is that much harder to get people to use, promote and contribute to linux. Otherwise we are left with a select few and linux stays in the basement.
I hate to break it to you, but there are a lot of users that are locked in because they rely on .NET apps. If you supply mono, then there is a better opportunity they can transition their current custom apps and use linux.
Novell may not be my favorite Linux company, but you can't discount the contribution because of unfounded "fears" about "some day they will ruin linux". If they walked away today, I would at least say "Thank you for all that you had contributed". Without companies like, IBM, Novell, RedHat, Canonical and others, linux would still be where it was at 5-6 years ago. Today it is a viable alternative to MS Windows for the desktop, and is replacing Solaris, AIX and HP-UX in record numbers.
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It's all about .NET, C# and the CLR (Score:5, Informative)
People hold high expectations on Novell, and I really don't know why. Of course they "bought" Suse in 2003, the Mono project, and some other free software projects. but Novell was, is and will always be a proprietary software company.
It's all about Mono.
While C# certainly doesn't have nearly the installed code base that Java has, ".NET" is pulling even with [and might even have surpassed] "J2EE":
As much as everybody loves to hate the guy, Ballmer was 100% correct when he said that it's all about "developers, developers, developers", and if you think ".NET" isn't the hottest thing in the programming market right now, then, well, you've been asleep at the wheel for the last five years.
Mono is the ace up Novell's sleeve; with the Microsoft agreement, they are assured that they've got something that Red Hat doesn't have, that Oracle won't have [with the upcoming "Oracle" Linux], and that even IBM or Sun wouldn't have, if they were to roll their own Linuxes, which is to say: An ironclad guarantee that their flavor of Linux will play nice with
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Anyone wondering if Novell is.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft lackey Novell Exec "My bad, Here is the papers that say we did give them all UNIX licenses"
Re:Anyone wondering if Novell is.. (Score:5, Interesting)
They will no longer come to the defense of open source projects if MS sues them and that's what MS was after all along. MS has already gotten the same kind of deal from Sun. If they can get IBM they will be done.
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Re:War is peace (Score:5, Informative)
It is simple as that. Without GPL, fair use aside, you cannot (legally) use, you cannot derive, you cannot distribute. With GPL, as long as you grant the same rights when you distribute, you can. Now tell me again, how GPL restricts any freedom? How can a license to restrict a freedom that you didn't have in the first place?
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Re:War is peace (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people would disagree with that. Hell, the GPL [gnu.org] disagrees with that:
See? "restrictions". Just because they are lesser restrictions than the default case of "no rights at all", that doesn't mean they ain't restrictive.
I'm a big fan of the GPL myself, but let's try not to sacrifice accuracy to zealotry here.
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Re:War is peace (Score:5, Insightful)
That's semantics. GPL doesn't restrict anything that you would be able to do with standard copyright law. Copyright law says you can't do A, B, C, D and E. GPL says you can now do A, B, C. How is that restricting?
Notice, I'm not denying GPL has more conditions than BSD or Public Domain. All I'm saying is that has one goal, to make sure any software and all its derivatives under that license will be able to be freely run, studied, derived and distributed. They never hid that goal, it is the GNU manifesto, for god sake. If they could simply say that, in a clear and unambiguously way, such confusions would never exist in the first place. But because of the likes of Tivo, Novell and others, that will try to find a loophole and release derivative works without granting those rights, FSF has to created this tangled network of legalese, to close as many holes as they can.
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Re:War is peace (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not free to own slaves. Am I restricted, or is everyone else more free? The answer is everyone is more free because nobody can own slaves.
Similarly, the GPL only restricts your ability to restrict others. This means the fewest restrictions for all. Isn't that the most freedom possible? Free to do anything but take freedom from others.
The GPL's restrictions are only anti-free to those who think only of themselves. The GPL is not for them.
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Re:War is peace (Score:4, Informative)
Then you are distributing the binary inside the router. That is distribution. You can modify it without releasing the sources as long as you only use it in-house. Microsoft could run Linksys Routers with a heavily modified Linux firmware and would not be required to release the source as long as they don't sell/distribute it.
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Software Patents in US are the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Copyright law is the mechanism by which GPL works, but SOFTWARE PATENTS are the real issue here, as Bruce explains very well in his talk.
The "protection racket" is about the patents that MS implies Linux infringes on. And as Bruce points out, pretty much any non-trivial software probably infringes on someone else's software patents.
That's because software patents in the USA have been doled out too easily. They are absurd.
What's worse, Bruce explains, there is actually a _penalty_ for trying to figure out if your own software infringes. Because if you can be shown to have infringed on a patent you actually know about, the damages are tripled.
Small companies and individual software developers are at the biggest risk. Because big companies have portfolios of patents that they routinely cross-license, thereby protecting themselves from each other. The small guys are locked out. And of course, little guys don't have the money to maintain a legal defense even when they are totally in the right, forcing them to settle.
Software patents in the US are the problem.
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^ Why is parent modded flamebait? ^ (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is the parent modded flamebait? This seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constructors of the US Constitution drafted the first amendment, I'm sure that yelling "fire!" maliciously in a crowded public building wasn't what they had in mind. Instead, it's a specific type of freedom which has a few limitations. However, these limitations are important to preserve the function and spirit of said rights. The same goes for the GPL.
By releasing code under the GPL, I'm saying effectively, "you can have my code for free, and even change whatever you want, provided you don't restrict anyone else from doing the same." The BSD license allows the author to say, "use whatever you like, and you can close up my source code and not share with anybody if you want to." If that license is more attractive to you, than by all means, release your code under the BSD license instead of GPL. But like me, many people want the guarantee of the continuing freedom of the code they release. For those of us who feel that way, the GPL is exactly the right license.
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Re:Is anything Novell offers under GPL3? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:GPL 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:GPL 3 (Score:4, Interesting)
The copyrights to the gcc toolchain belong to the FSF -- they ARE the owners of the work! It has long been a condition to work on the official fork: if you want your patches to go everywhere, you assign copyright. Developers that don't like that are free to make their own forks (as with Emacs vs. XEmacs), but FSF has had enough developers who are OK with it to now have the definitive version of gcc.
And if you think GPLv3 is a recent "game" from a "faction" in the FSF, you haven't been paying attention for about 20 years. FSF has ALWAYS been about copyleft. They predate the OSS movement by a decade and Usenet is littered with the ashes of long flamewars about the GPL license.
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