[PLUG] Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights!

Matt McKenzie lnxknight at gmail.com
Sat Aug 11 00:13:15 UTC 2007


On 8/10/07, Bruce KIlpatrick <bakilpatrick at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Galen Seitz wrote:
> > Time to celebrate with a pint or two.
> >
> > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070810165237718
> >
> >
> > galen
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > PLUG mailing list
> > PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
> >
> Okay,
>
> I was under the impression that Novell was the "bad guy" since they took
> SUSE from FOSS to a licensed product.  I got this impression from
> someone else's opinion of Novell.
>
> Please give me the "Reader's Digest Condensed Version" (RDCV) of what
> the celebration is about.  I admit ignorance and throw myself at the
> feet of the group's collective wisdom.  I should state for the record
> that I don't need an excuse to quaff a well bred dark and slightly sweet
> microbrew!
>
> Bruce
>

Perhaps someone else can sum it up better, but here is my shot:

First there are a couple different things going on, the SCO vs. Novell court
case, which has been going on for a LONG time, and the Novell & M$ patent
deal.
Completely separate issues.

As for the case, Novell is now confirmed to be the inheritor of the original
UNIX copyrights, not SCO.  This means that all the claims that SCO was
making about them owning IP (intellectual property, namely code) that was
stolen and put into Linux, have fallen to dust.  This means that the other
major case, SCO vs. IBM, should be over much quicker (relatively), as well
as any other SCO cases hanging out there (SCO vs. RedHat I think...?).

The Novell and M$ patent protection deal, which many have called a bit of
extortion, is a whole separate issue.
Also, SuSE is still FOSS.  They sell it just like SuSE did on it's own
before Novell bought them, with support contracts, and Non-FOSS software
along with FOSS software,
and they have the "community" free edition, with only FOSS software,
OpenSuSE.

Many people in the FOSS community did not like what Novell did in this M$
patent deal, but many others saw it as a "necessary evil" in order to
continue in the corporate world with SuSE being able to inter-operate well
with M$, and not having to worry about potential patent lawsuits from M$.
Along that vein, many still doubt the validity of these claims from M$ (they
have not disclosed exactly what these alleged patents are that Linux
allegedly infringes on), but for Novell you could say it was a CYA
maneuver.  Some other Linux vendors have jumped on the bandwagon to make
deals with M$, such as Linspire, Xandros.  But some of the bigger ones
refuse to, such as RedHat and Ubuntu (and Debian obviously, though they are
not themselves a commercial distributor).

So as far as the whole situation of Linux being potentially "tainted" with
stolen code from SCO, that has been blasted to bits.  For this Novell is
definitely to be thanked.
As for the M$ deal, a lot of people will still be weary.  Perhaps in some
ways, this case finally being won will redeem Novell.

This whole potential legal cloud over Linux had a dampening effect on its
adoption- though happily it did not completely stop it as no doubt SCO (and
M$) had hoped.
Now that the cloud is lifted, more people will be less afraid of adopting
Linux.

However the case is not completely over- but the main big hurdle is
crossed.


-- 
----------
Matt M.
LinuxKnight



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