Dennis Byron

SCO vs. Novell: The Last Word Has Yet To Be Said

Thanks for registering, hapmoori.

You don't say what it is that you found odd however? Therefore I am not sure if you are objecting to the judge's opinion (see link in article) or mine. I assume it is the judge's opinion you are arguing with because my only opinion above is that Novell had good lawyers and that Novell shareholders have a stake in this (this is an investment research site after all). There is nothing in my opinion based on anything by McBride, only by the Utah Federal District Court Judge, cited by page and paragraph where required.

Is it possible that somewhere in the past you read the 1995 Novell-SCO agreement but not the Ammendments that came out in 1995 and 1996???

Also according to the judge's ruling in August 2007, it is the non-compete clause and not the asset purchase list that gave SCO grounds to sue Novell. That they didn't is just a continuation of the bad legal advice they have been getting all along.

Either way, like they say, it ain't over til it's over.

Thanks again

Dennis

New General Public License To Challenge Microsoft-Novell Linux Deal

Whoa!

I am not sure of the source of the sentence above: "The new license is aimed at undermining a deal inked between Microsoft and Linux support provider Novell in November, which implied that Microsoft has legal rights to Linux, according to some." It is misleading in two directions:
-- The rewriting of the Gnu General Public License (GPL) has been ongoing for a couple of years and has nothing specific to do with the November 2006 Microsoft-Novell agreement. Two subpoints:
1. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) public comment/review process ended in July 2006. If changes have been made by the FSF since the closing of the public process in order to counter future Novell-Microsoft-like deals without allowing public scrutiny of those changes, that would be unlike the FSF's usual open process and kind of against their ethics.
2. The FSF leader, Richard Stallman, has been quoted to say that the Novell-Microsoft deal is totally in agreement with the current GPL license so nothing in the new draft would "undermine" the current Novell-Microsoft arrangment.
-- The Novell-Microsoft agreeement didn't really imply anything about Microsoft asserting legal rights. Steve Ballmer says it explicitly any time he speaks about patents in general and has been doing so for a couple of years

Reuters has a history of misconstruing FSF statements so as to get some Microsoft vs. the open source software (OSS) world drama going. I assume that is what is happening here.

As for the statement that the FSF "owns most of the rights to the Linux operating system," it's a pretty good bet that the FSF is not the source of that statement because they would have used the term GNU/Linux. This license wording issue is in the minutia when compared to license options from Apache, Berkeley, and so forth. But if you want to dive down into it, see my posts at ebizq.net under OSS Culture.