Novell Gets $348 Million From Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes, "Novell has published additional details about its agreements with Microsoft concerning Windows and Linux interoperability and patents. It seems the company is receiving an up-front payment of $348 million from Microsoft, for SLES subscription certificates and for patent cross-licensing. Microsoft will make an upfront payment to Novell of $240 million for SLES subscription 'certificates' that Microsoft can use, resell, or distribute over the term of the agreement. Regarding the patent cooperation agreement, Microsoft will make an up-front net payment to Novell of $108 million, and Novell will make ongoing payments totaling at least $40 million over five years to Microsoft."

Novell defends it's move ...

[breem42]

From the same site (different page - http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4685037869.html [linux-watch.com]) :

"Under the patent cooperation agreement, Novell's customers receive directly from Microsoft a covenant not to sue. Novell does not receive a patent license or covenant not to sue from Microsoft, and we have not agreed with Microsoft to any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL. Our agreement does not affect the freedom that Novell or anyone else in the open source community, including developers, has under the GPL and does not impose any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL. Therefore, the agreement is fully compliant with the GPL,"

Mod parent Troll

[PCM2]

In return, lets see, they get.. your source code, YAST, AppArmor, mindshare, and info on your business.

Heh. Nice troll. You really think Microsoft had to pay $380 million for Suse's source code? If that's what happened then Ron Hovsepian must be have been doubled over laughing all week.

P.S. Yes folks, both YaST and AppArmor are GPL.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:OIN?

[quantaman]

It turns out that the crown jewels of OIN's collection, the Commerce One patents (covering a bunch of XML stuff), were contributed by Novell [livejournal.com].

Again, I don't think that Novell can withdraw those patents or that the patents would be covered by Novell's agreement with MS but it is still an interesting twist.

Re:NTFS support

[irgu]

NTFS-3G has full read-write, open source NTFS support for a few months: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ [ntfs-3g.org] Fedora Extra, Debian, Ubuntu and many others have it already.

Re: Interoperability?

[10Ghz]

"Linux is not simpler than Windows. You don't simply push a button and suddenly everything works. I just installed Ubuntu on my laptop and had to fight a small war to get accelerated graphics working. I had to change the wireless network stuff so it used ndiswrapper instead of whatever it was the installer wanted to use to prevent it from constantly dropping connections."

I spent my entire yesterday-evening fixing my neighbours computer. She complained that it was "running very slowly". It's a XP-machine, and it had antivirus installed (in fact, several of them). I removed the multitude of antivirus-software (which had expired anyway), installed new antivirus, scanned the machine, scanned it for adware and spyware, the usual stuff. And it did make it a bit better. I also noticed that she only had 256MB of RAM, which is quite little these days. Luckily I had two 512MB sticks of RAM lying around, so I installed those in her computer.

As I booted the machine, her net-connection did not work anymore. Just like that. No matter how hard I tried, it just wont go online. I even tried to put the old RAM back, just in case, but no help. It seems like the machine has mysteriously lost the HomePNA-adapter that is in the machine. I'm not really sure what to do next, maybe I should move the adapter to another slot, and hope that XP rediscovers it. Or maybe I should just erase everything, and reinstall the whole crap from scratch.

End result is that before I touched the machine, she had a computer that was so cluttered with crap that it was un-usable. What she got was a machine that is usable but wont get online. Linux might have it's problem but at least it

a) does not get filled with crap
b) does not slow down because it has three virus-scanners running in the background
c) does not mysteriously lose components that were working fine 5 minutes ago.

How about our Windows-server at work? It has a HD that is partitioned in to C and D-drives. One day it had switched the drive-letters around. Just like that. What used to be C, was now D, and vice versa. We rebooted the machine, no help. We rebooted again, no help. We rebooted to safe-mode, no help. we rebooted to recovery-console and checked few things (but didn't change anything). Then we rebooted for a fifth time, and this time everything worked. We didn't change anything, we just repeatedly rebooted the machine, and suddenly it started to work again. Where is the logic in this? And why does Windows suddenly decide to switch drive-letters around? Seriously? What the hell is going on here?

And how exactly are ANY of these things "simple"?

Re:Its' Not a Patent Deal.

[anandsr]

The deal works out this way. If Novell distributes some code in Linux under GPL that uses patents from MS, and MS sues a third party. Then GPL says that particular software is not distributable by anybody, including Novell no matter what agreement Novell has with MS. The Covenent doesn't matter. I guess nothing can be done before a lawsuit, but after the lawsuit if Novell is found distributing the particular code then they can be sued by the owners of the code from which the patented code was derived. So all in all I believe Novell is safe now, but there is no point to the agreement unless there is something else that is in dark, like perhaps the SCO case (but I can't believe anybody would pay any money for flogging that dead horse).

Re:I'm left to wonder if

[killjoe]

Yes. Novell is the new SCO.

If you really want to understand what's going on go read groklaw. The headline here is wrong. There is no patent cross licensing, that would violate the GPL. There is a promise which is not a license not to sue. It's a weird thing. There are also some unsaid, unprinted, nobody knows about exception.

So MS promises not to sue novell customers for MS patents with some exceptions. Most likely those exceptions involve some companies (for example google) or some technologies like XML.

MS has promised to sue other companies. Ballmer said that anybody who uses linux from anybody except novell is under a threat of a patent lawsuit from MS.

Re:Are you trying to be funny?

[miro f]

ok, here's Joe User steps:

click system
click administration
click synaptic package manager

(this is the place where everything on your computer is managed. Think of it like "Add/Remove Programs" in Windows Control Panel)

click settings
click repositories

make sure all the checkboxes are checked and click apply. This only needs to be done once.

click reload

search for nvidia-glx
click install
click apply

there you go. No terminals, no editing configuration files, all in a nice gui form, in a central management place where it's easy to ensure that you know exactly what is on your computer.

And why aren't these instructions on the wiki? because giving someone instructions to put into a console is much more concise, simple, and much more difficult to screw up than guiding them through a GUI.

Re: Interoperability?

[drinkypoo]

Reinstalled XP Pro in about 40 minutes, including time spent downloading and installing drivers.

Today, if you start with XP Pro with SP2 slipstreamed (or just an XP w/SP2 disc from MS) you will have about 30 minutes and four reboots just to download updates (at broadband speeds) to bring you up to current. How long ago did you do this install?

Starting with SP1, or with no-SP and installing SP2, you end up with about six reboots and an hour downloading/installing. Mind you, I'm talking about a fairly fast machine here, too.