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Boycott Novell Protesters Manhandled In India
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Nov 16, 2008 11:14 PM
from the opposite-of-freedom dept.
from the opposite-of-freedom dept.
James Mathew writes "This is an interesting story from Kerala, India, where the ruling Communist Party organized a national conference in its efforts to hijack the Free Software Movement, which has enviable roots in the state. They got Novell to sponsor it. On the second day of the conference, a few free software activists who displayed posters against Novell were manhandled by the organizers and police — typical of what is expected from them. Most of the snaps taken during the scuffle were forcefully deleted by the organizers, after seizing the protesters' mobile phones. Still they couldn't delete all. Here is another blow-by-blow account."
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News: How Microsoft Beats GNU/Linux In Schools 476 comments
twitter writes "Ever wonder why schools still use Windows? Boycott Novell has extracted the details from 2002 Microsoft email presented in the Comes vrs Microsoft case and other leaks. What emerges is Microsoft's desperate battle to 'never lose to Linux.' At stake for Microsoft is more than a billion dollars of annual revenue, vital user conditioning and governmental lock in that excludes competition, and software freedom for the rest of us. Education and Government Incentives [EDGI] and "Microsoft Unlimited Potential" are programs that allows vendors to sell Windows at zero cost. Microsoft's nightmare scenario has already been realized in Indiana and other places. Windows is not really competitive and schools that switch save tens of millions of dollars. Because software is about as expensive as the hardware in these deals, the world could save up to $500 million each year by dumping Microsoft. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's hard to see what Microsoft can do other than what they did to Peter Quinn."
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Communist software (Score:5, Funny)
SW Patent Pact put Novell outside the community (Score:5, Informative)
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...
Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on [groklaw.net]. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal [groklaw.net] where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.
People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell [boycottnovell.com] and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono [infoworld.com] wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.
Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.
At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move [itworldcanada.com]. Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside [practical-tech.com] the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.
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Re:SW Patent Pact put Novell outside the community (Score:5, Interesting)
I really don't see why this is being modded up.
Yes, I understand that you have some vitriolic hatred toward Mono and consider developers working on it to be a source of wasted talent on what you consider to be a useless piece of software. So what? Others disagree and happen to like Mono for whatever other reason.
Novell is in an interesting position, where they started out as proprietary software developers and developed a rather rock solid business model that gave them some huge piles of cash for awhile. The world shifted and frankly Mircosoft is largely to blame for the fact that the earlier businesses that Novell was involved with died a hard death. Novell even tried to compete with offering a better product and using hard-nosed sound engineering principles, only to get shafted by Microsoft when they deliberately put in software that would screw up the Novell network protocols into their Windows OS suites.
I could get into more, but Novell certainly isn't "in bed with Microsoft", and in fact has found a rather interesting way to insulate itself from Microsoft's tactics: embrace and join with the open source software movement. I think it is a stinking genius move on their part, and without moving to supporting open source software, Novell would no longer even exist as a company... or certainly would be looking at auctioning off most of their office furniture (as they already have).
Novell here is the victim of Microsoft harassment, and the reason they are acting they way that they do is precisely out of sheer survival and based on their history.
Furthermore, this still doesn't justify why it was necessary for these protesters to be jerks and disrupt a conference, exhibiting behavior that wouldn't be acceptable in any other "free" country elsewhere in the world either. If this had happened at a technology conference in Las Vegas, I wouldn't have expected anything different (or perhaps the LVPD would be a little more rough).
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"piracy" only helps M$, hurts FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
So-called piracy only helps M$ against FOSS [latimes.com]. See this 2006 LA Times article:
Advocating piracy [timesonline.co.uk] in order to undercut competitors has carried M$ through the decades even now:
The only way for the market situation to get better is to avoid any and all use of M$Âproducts, including "pirated" ones.
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Alternative Viewpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Free Software activists start a protest on private property, are asked to leave by owners/organisers and forgo negotiation, instead opting for point-blank refusal. This leads to a confrontation because both of both parties being excessively stubborn.
Sounds like 50/50 blame split to me.
Re:Alternative Viewpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
There shouldnt be any freedom of speech limiting withing groups which both support open and free software.
Why not? Open source and free software events have rules and agendas like any other meeting. And participants have limited time to get the job done they came for.
If participants or protestors won't shut up and keep disrupting the event, they should get kicked out by security. It doesn't matter who it is or what message they are pushing, and it doesn't matter whether it's in the US or India.
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Re:Alternative Viewpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say this was a Open Source and Free Software meeting and all they promoted was proprietary software. Would protesting that be fair?
That's exactly what they're doing according to Groklaw and even Novell themselves ,
Remember that Novell helped Microsoft get OOXML approved and Novell forked OpenOffice.org as soon as it moved to GPLv3.
Of course don't forget that Novell make their own version of Microsoft's SilverLight but they call it Moonlight. It's free to download but you have to download it from Novell to get patent indemnity... it exploits loopholes in GPLv2 in order to remove open source rights. To quote Miguel...
So this is what Novell want to make Open Source. These protesters stood up for the spirit and the letter of the GPL. Good on them!
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Boycott Boycott Novell (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Boycott Boycott Novell (Score:5, Funny)
That's a reason to lead a campaign against Novell in itself.
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by that reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
By that reasoning, you should boycott anything Linus or the BSD community produce: when those projects started, their kernels and tools were under considerable legal uncertainty. AT&T and other vendors claimed lots of copyrights and patents. You also shouldn't use Java because Sun has numerous patents on Java.
Open source has always been pushing the limits on patents, copyrights, and cloning, and open source has always been rubbing powerful vendors the wrong way. If anything, the legal situation surrounding Mono is better than it was for Linux or Java: with Mono, we have a public commitment from Microsoft that the core is free (the core that FOSS Mono software actually uses), and nobody has been able to identify patents that read on the core language, libraries, or runtime.
The only reason people get pushed out of shape about Mono is because of the Microsoft connection. But let me tell you: the original UNIX overlords were just as nasty and monopolistic and people still adopted Linux and made it a success.
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Re:Boycott Boycott Novell (Score:5, Funny)
Man, you say "fuck" a lot. You're Sean Connery's distant relative or something?
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Re:Boycott Boycott Novell (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is, these guys aren't actually contributing anything. Instead they just sit around and criticize fucking awesome hackers. Mono is really fantastic software. If you don't like it, just don't use it.
In other words: it should be about the code, not the politics.
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Re:Boycott Boycott Novell (Score:4, Interesting)
I think your missing the point.
Novell is being productive and an asset to the open source community while the best the protesters will do is stop that. They are claiming to be helping the OSS community by chasing the developers, hackers and supporters away. That's sort of like giving your baby up for adoption to a family financially and morally worse off then you are and expecting it to have a better life.
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BoycottNovell - the sad truth (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, zealous protesters on private property and zealous policemen aside, Roy Schestowitz is just a kid with massive amounts of time on his hands and a grudge the size of Ireland. He's an unemployed college dropout who lives with his parents (I'm not kidding here) and his credibility level is less than zero. Occasionally he'll write up something interesting, but with his seemingly 24/7/365 posting activity (just head on to COLA [google.com] to get an idea) most of what he writes is just self-referential gobbledygook of no value whatsoever. Six or seven thousand-word-plus posts per day? No way.
Anyone who thinks Microsoft made Hans Reiser kill his wife [boycottnovell.com], claims he turned down a "six figure" job because they asked him for a Word document [boycottnovell.com] or posts things like [digg.com] these [digg.com] shouldn't be taken seriously. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and that's what he banks on. The rest is really just his inexperience, insane hatred and child-like demeanor showing through.
That blog is nothing more than an endless stream of misrepresentations, thinly veiled lies, witch hunts [boycottnovell.com] and weird "THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD BE SCARED OF" prose, accentuated by what I suppose he thinks are "funny" photoshopped images of people and things he thinks are out to get him. A few days ago he wrote up a storm about all the journalists he estimated had been "bribed" by Microsoft because they got evaluation laptops with Windows 7, and a few of those people actually humoured him by stopping by and explaining why they wouldn't throw away decades of journalistic experience and reputation for a $2,000 laptop, but he just ignored them. Hey, he's right and he knows it.
Linux.com featured [linux.com] an article by Bruce Byfield on this. Roy has a retinue of about half a dozen hanger-ons why post up a storm whenever and wherever anyone criticizes his abrasive "advocacy", which can be seen clearly there... don't miss the fact that our very own favorite troll [slashdot.org] is also chummy with him (I mean if you needed an excuse). It seems he does these days [slashdot.org] is post [slashdot.org] links [slashdot.org] to Schestowitz's blog with his fourteen accounts anyway.
I'm sure it's important to keep an eye out for Microsoft and all, but by god, this guy is just bad news for the FOSS community. He brings out the worst of the "OMG I HATE MICROSOFT, I AM ANGRY AND I'M GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!" crowd. On purpose, I'm sure. Because the more abrasive he becomes, the more people dislike him and the more he can claim he's being "stalked" and "targeted" by the Evil Empire (TM). That kid is trapped in a vicious circle he built for himself. He needs to take a deep breath, go outside and play or something. He's so desperate and impatient to make a name for himself but he goes about it with such incompetence (volume != quality) that sometimes I think he must be sponsored by someone or something like that. Hell, he's already claiming Microsoft and Novell are directly responsible for all this.
Anyway, teh internet is serious business and all that...
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I can't wait for the morons to appear here (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, the die-hard haters who come out of the woodwork every time Novell is mentioned, dredging up the years old Microsoft deal, which I predicted at the time would have zero impact on Linux and FOSS and have been vindicated in that prediction - except for the haters.
These people really don't give a damn about Linux or FOSS - all they care about is establishing that they're more "moral" than everyone else by opposing any interoperability deals with Microsoft. The fact that the average corporation couldn't care less and only wants some assurance that their Linux deployment will work with their Microsoft deployment is ignored by these morons. The fact that this allows Novell to improve, however small, Linux's penetration into the data center and corporations doesn't interest them either. The fact that whatever Novell agreed to in the deal in terms of "patent protection" is overwhelmingly irrelevant to any future patent cases (which so far haven't materialized and are unlikely to - and unlikely to be won by Microsoft when they do, as countless people have pointed out) doesn't matter to these clowns either.
Only their juvenile emotional well-being matters to them - and of course, damaging the emotional well-being of everyone else who disagrees with their fanaticism.
Fuck 'em.
Re:I can't wait for the morons to appear here (Score:4, Funny)
You know, the die-hard haters who come out of the woodwork every time Novell is mentioned, dredging up the years old Microsoft deal, which I predicted at the time would have zero impact on Linux and FOSS and have been vindicated in that prediction - except for the haters.
Yeah, but in all fairness, I think many of us forgot that you predicted that. If we'd remembered, we would definitely have kept our mouths shut.
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Re:I can't wait for the morons to appear here (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I can't wait for the morons to appear here (Score:4, Informative)
If MONO is GPLed, then anyone can distribute it because the GPL gives them that right. Novell is the only one offering patent indemnification which isn't the same thing. MS has never claimed they would sue anyone for MONO if they distributed the source or got it from somewhere other then novell. It is nothing but FUD when people claim Novell is the only ones who can distribute something covered by the GPL. You are taking No more of a change with Mono then you would be from any other product. If some company decides they own a patent on the product and sue you, you hit regardless of using Mono or KDE or Gnome or Linux or BSD or GCC or whatever the person makes the claim about.
Hell, the GPLv3 doesn't even fix that. All it says is that if you know about a patent covering the product, you can't distribute it unless you can distribute a license to use the patent too. If a third party declares they own something in the produce or have a patent that coveres it, your in the same boat as any other license or Mono.
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MySpace/YouTube Integration is a feature emerging (Score:5, Insightful)
Lesson for next time: Use a phone with automatic blogging so the photos are off the phone and on the Net before they can stop you.
so how much of a hero are you? (Score:4, Informative)
Lesson for next time: Use a phone with automatic blogging so the photos are off the phone and on the Net before they can stop you.
"What's this? Where are the photos you took?" "You uploaded them to a website?"
Then you get to enjoy a free trip in the back of a truck to somewhere with a net connection, and then you get pushed in front of a monitor and keyboard and told to log in and delete the photos by men with guns.
Your idea is great in a country where the police won't threaten to shoot you. Even here in the US, if they don't like you enough, you'll "resist arrest" and need a trip to the hospital; it happened to a photojournalism student in Provincetown, MA when the cops didn't like him taking photos of them beating the shit out of drunks.
Why do you think NYC doesn't supply flashlights to the cops and banned its officers from carrying Maglites larger than 3 D-cells? It's because cops used them to beat the shit out of people...
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others top my list (Score:5, Insightful)
The objections of BoycottNovell.com against Novell make no sense to me: Microsoft's deal with Novell hasn't affected anybody negatively, and Novell continues to make valuable contributions to the FOSS communities (note: I'm an Ubuntu user, and although I like Mono better than Java, I don't use it much).
At the top of my list of companies that claim to be open source-friendly but that actually have dangerous agendas would be Sun, Apple, and Nokia. All of those companies have big patent portfolios, deals with Microsoft, and patent deals, and they have frequently acted against the interests of open source and open standards, and we still don't boycott them. Furthermore, although those other companies talk a lot about their contributions, Novell is probably responsible for a lot more software that people use day-to-day.
Most photos taken with digicams can be undeleted (Score:5, Informative)
There has never been a time in my life when some person of supposed authority have made any attempt to force me to delete photographs from my digital camera. Perhaps I am just not taking photos of important things. But should that happen I might gleefully comply if I didn't want to make a big deal about it.
Many digital cameras use VFAT filesystems which means their contents can be recovered. The utility of my personal choice is photorec(1). The photorec utility runs quite well on Linux. Just use /bin/dd to make an image of the SCSI disk to your HDD, run photorec with the device file as the parameter.
Photorec is written by Christophe GRENIER (no, I am not he) and can be found at:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/ [cgsecurity.org]
Re:What a Shame !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Boycott Novell? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
In addition, they're idiots. They kill people who oppose them (Singur, Nandigram). Their so-called activists, burn, rape and pillage. I, a leftist, would choose the Congress Party of India over the CPM any day.
In addition, they have thin skins, criticising the CPI(M) is A Bad Thing. "Don't you have any respect? How dare you say something about such a respected party" No, fuck you. Lumpen crap.
Footnote: This is the case with most big things in India, the BJP and the Congress are no different, except that they don't hide what they are, and the Congress is a bit too wimpy to shut people up.
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