Hello

"rather says "you shouldn't have entered into such an agreement for commercial purposes"

It would be more general to say that though. Which makes no one can offer Linux commercially (but not closed source). But the letter says:

"As the agreement stands today, it betrays the authors of the software you re-market and their users worldwide for Novell's sole commercial benefit."

The keyword is "sole" - meaning only Novell may profit from the hardwork of FOSS authors as expressed in the agreement between Novell and Microsoft. This is what have been pointed out in my first post of this thread about "Unpaid Developers". That FOSS developers have no right to create a business ecosystem around their contributed codes to openSuse/Suse.

I hope that helps.

It doesn't help because instead of saying "you don't have the right to have entered such an agreement" he words it as a complaint against doing things for commercial reasons. As I said originally it is unlikely a for profit business is going to buy into that view no matter how many people sign the petition.

My main problems with what he wrote isn't the idea of protesting the agreement which as I'm all for. The problems are that as worded (my read/characterization/opinion) it makes the concession I originally noted and attacks the agreement not from a legal (no right) standpoint but from an iffy moral (commercial is bad) standpoint.

Most of the discussion here seems to go to intent of the document and I'm willing to assume it was well intentioned. My comments are based on the ideas that lawyers who spend their time doing things like defining what "is" means would be able to read it the way I did and therefore use it as amunition against Open Source rather than its presumed intent as a defense of Open Source.

hello jlighter,

"It doesn't help because instead of saying "you don't have the right to have entered such an agreement" he words it as a complaint against doing things for commercial reasons."

I wouldn't think about bruce perens being against going commercial, so long as, it does not go against the FOSS Licenses or ecology so to say. If he was, he would have been against RedHat and other commercial distros.

The agreement states that Microsoft will protect Novell customers only, and further on, only "unpaid" FOSS developers are free from any lawsuit but if a FOSS developer would create income stream from his/her contribution he/she would be in danger.

to wit:

"As the agreement stands today, it betrays the authors of the software you re-market and their users worldwide for Novell's sole commercial benefit."

One can go commercial in GNU/Linux but if one does it by betraying the FOSS developers ---> that is another case.

I hope that helps.

I think you're missing the point. I am not disagreeing with the intent of the letter but rather its wording.

I was on one side of just such a discussion on another forum recently. Everybody had real trouble with separating fact from opinion, and things got icky-sticky for a while there. No one was blameless, especially me. I *was* the grasshopper that's always wrong in arguments with a chicken, though, and my reputation on that forum has suffered even though I believe I was correct in my assertions, etc., etc, and especially, etc.

This Novell-Microsoft thing is a big thing. It's not one that I, as a user of OpenSuSE 10.0, was happy to see.

Mr. Perens is an insightful human being, and is trying to make a difference.

None of us are lawyers if I read it rightly.

Let's be careful and continue to respect one another as we have so far, please.

Thanks,
horusfalcon

I find it funny that the first people who are protesting this are usually the ones who want Microsoft, as well as all major hardware vendors and all ISP's, to play well with Linux.

This is a two way street, people.

I don't quite understand that. The reason for the protest is the perception that MS's intent in this is not "cooperation" but "coercion". i.e. The perception MS wants to sue based on patents to eliminate "open source" and bring it back into the "pay us royalties" realm.

If Microsoft wanted to "cooperate" they'd just embrace the standards and might even go open source themselves. Look at all the issues it took for them to say they'll support the "open document" format and that's just to say it. Given the way they rode roughshod over Sun's Java to make their own non-compliant Java and going so far as to fight Sun in court over it I have my doubts about how well they'll embrace that "standard".

There should be no wonder that people really doubt MS's intentions as being anything good.

Let's not forget that Microsoft's answer to anything they couldn't just sue into the ground or buy out has always been to first "embrace" and then "extend". "Embrace" as in embrace the standard, analyze it, see what is good about it, and then "extend" as in add on to it functionalities, features, and sometimes downright traps which make their version of it incompatible with the standard from which it was grown. MS Java is a case in point, but only a recent one. This has been MS's modus operandi for a long time now. I see no reason for them to change now - this strategy has been too successful for them. Their whole reason for .NET was to exclude, not to include. Unless and until they endure a paradigm shift of major proportions, they will continue to pervert open standards for their own ends.

Microsoft and threats. I am willing to bet a thousand dollars to one dollar that there is code in Microsoft XP, MS office, and other MS software that came from Open Source General Public License software.

There should be a tit-for-tat, that if MS threatans to sue Linux distros, that linux distros sue Microsoft. The cost to Microsoft, to replace code in 490 million computers would really correspond to the cost to replace what the court would judge to be linux code, supposedly to be in violation of MS patents, and installed without cost in freely available distributions.

As I don't believe in software patents, I see all this fuss caused by less than astute Novell executives. I am afraid of using Novell now, or any other Novell software variations because I fear that Novell will potentially implement MS trojan gifts

This is one reason I have stopped at SuSE 10.0, as it is "pre-alliance". I probably will shift to Fedora unless this mess is sorted out quickly. One of the strengths of the FOSS community is that one has choices... since everyone can contribute, anyone can distribute.

In diversity, there is strength. Novell should've known better: they've bedded down with Microsoft before.