What is your take on the Nouvelle/Microsoft deal and could it harm the Linux community long term?
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at
10:00
Whoops ! I spelt Nouvell wrong.
Filed under: Microsoft
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I will not claim to have any greater knowledge of this matter than others, but I have read and studied this and some of the associated issue related with it. For example,the Higgens Project. This is basically the OSS version of MS’s CardSpace. It was going to revolutionize our experience by keeping track of secure data. This is from Dale Olds, who is THE (well, one of em anyway…) distinguished engineer at Novell, and working on the Higgens project as well. Go on and guess how co-operative MS is being? I’ll provide a link below if yer interested. Yes, it harms the community simply because Redmond is playing a game of delayed tactics. Even as the Euro Commonwealth is trying to force them, MS is still beating into submission or buying outright their competition. Linux gets hurt because everyone is still afraid to even POTENTIALLY infringe on the shadow of MSs’ domain. So, they claim to be supporting OSS, but at the same time that support does not entail releasing any of the code they in principal agreed to. I’ll keep it short- MS is playing poker, and just called dueces wild…
I fear, much to my own shame as an openSuSE user, that it may indeed do harm in the long run.
But I respect Novell’s decision for one reason alone – they’re covering their arse and those of their customers.
No, I don’t think Microsoft have a leg to stand on with this copyright nonsense, but they DO have a lot of money to throw at lawyers. It might not be such a bad idea to take a precaution.
But yes, it probably is harmful. I can understand people boycotting them for doing this, I can understand the anger, but I think they did what they thought was right. I don’t think it’s fair to vilify them for caution.