Novell keeps Unix copyrights from Microsoft Novell has moved to quell growing concerns that it has sold Linux out to Microsoft as part of its Attachmate deal. On Wednesday, Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon issued a short statement saying that Novell – not Microsoft – owns the copyrights on Unix. Sentence two of Dragoon's terse, three-sentence statement said …
I used to work for attachmate, before I was laid off in the Great Recession. Attachmate's absentee owners bought it for something like $500 million from its founders, then mortgaged it to the eyeballs to retrieve their stake. After that, if attachmate makes money, that's good. If it dies, it dies. This happened during the run-up to the Great Recession when banks were loaning money for ANYTHING at terrific rates.
If these same guys have bought Novel, you can believe it was probably because it had assets they could sell or mortgage. That's the only thing driving this acquisition. Attachmate is a conglomerate of legacy businesses. They don't innovate (much). They don't grow, because the absentee owners don't give a rip for the software business. The software team at attachmate are wonderful folks. But the owners are everything you loathe about finance people.
> Can't all the open sourcers chip in and buy them from Novell?
What for?
> Mark Shuttleworth would be better chipping in some cash instead of buying a luxury flat.
Mark Shuttleworth has nothing to do with this - saving that he's rich, and could probably afford the deal if he were motivated to do so.
But there's no business advantage for him.
> If Unix copyrights ended up in the hands of a patent troll then there
> would be a lot of trouble for Linux, Solaris and OSX.
No, there wouldn't.
Many years ago, a copyright troll named SCO tried to make trouble using this method. The first hurdle they had to overcome - and failed to do so - was to demonstrate that they owned the copyrights to Unix at all.
In many ways, it is a shame that this case went first, because it leads to so many hand-wringing posts on Internet fora about how dreadful it's going to be when someone richer than SCO owns some of the Unix copyrights.
The next case that SCO needs to deal with - which is currently stayed pending the outcome of the SCO vs. Novell case - is about whether or not there is any AT&T-derived[1] Unix code in Linux anyway. Discovery in that case was long, tortuous, and expensive. SCO found *fuck all*. IBM have a lot of counterclaims that will devastate anything that makes it out of the Novell case.
There is no more mileage to be had from trolling these ancient Unix copyrights around. The FUD worked for some time - but now pretty much everyone knows how baseless were SCO's claims. There is no AT&T Unix in Linux.
What we should be worrying about is the 882 patents that were sold to CPTN - but even those are probably harmless. The implicit patent grant in GPLv2 is probably sufficient, should those patents read on anything in Linux, and estoppel should prevent MS from actually asserting them against Linux users. There is still some uncertainty there - but it is likely that the patent transfer has more to do with settling the WordPerfect suit than anything else.
Vic.
[1] There is a fair bit of BSD-derived Unix in Linux, but that is not covered by these copyrights[2], and is properly licenced anyway.
[2] AT&T's slack approach to copyright notices is one of the reasons why so much of Unix is no longer protectable by copyright anyway.
Especially when they are broadly defined. In case you might not remember, Amazon did a lot of damage patenting that 1-click nonsense. Microsoft has always managed to extract money from companies selling Linux-based products by licensing patents without ever specifying what those patents cover. The only notable exception was TomTom who settled after telling the world what Microsoft's pretenses were. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._TomTom for a very short but eye-opening lecture on this matter.
Since the Novell/Microsoft deal four years ago, Shuttleworth increasingly using Ubuntu as some bizarre plaything, Mandriva's never ending financial uncertainties, and Fedora's short life-cycles with low maintenance periods, we may as well all just go back to the big grand-daddy of them all now and stop messing with the lesser offshoots and poor imitations, and just use Debian. It's the one distro you can count always to remain pure and never become somebody else's pawn. And with Debian Squeeze due this Christmas/New Year, it's the perfect time to vote with our distro-switching!
(FYI: I'm currently using Ubuntu 10.04 but its future as a normal person's O/S now seems uncertain)
who in effect controls Attachmate. They are supposedly owned by some investment companies so presumably Balmer can pop round for a cup of tea and point out how Attachmates investments in MS shares are so much better off with people continuing patent/copyright bullying with no eveidence.
trust folk at Novell to tell the truth. After all, they are the "hire for cash" sweetiepies that cut the "patent fear" deal with MS. They also pushed Mono and destroyed a perfectly good Linux distro _ SuSE and gave us that crapola openSUSE with its consistently faulty package installer after busting Yast, dropped KDE for Gnome to keep the Zimians happy and ...whatever.
Imagine the chap at openSUSE bitchin about Ubuntu not making a "contribution" to Linux. If they all made "contributions" like Novell has, Linux would be kaput.
Tits up is too good for them.
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