I’ll be on the lookout for any interestingly-placed Novell ads in the area besides the banners in the Pru, I’m there just about every day. (I also live just down the street from Novell’s headquarters in Waltham so this is pretty cool to see).

And to Red Hat if anyone is reading, if you want to get back at Novell, let me know, I can give you some good places in Waltham.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080611191302741

Specifically from Moglen:

“Red Hat’s settlement of outstanding patent litigation on terms that provide additional protection to other members of the community upstream and downstream from Red Hat is a positive contribution to the resources for community patent defense. We would hope to see more settlements of this kind–in which parties secure more than their own particular legal advantage in relation to the third-party patent risk of the whole FOSS community–when commercial redistributors of FOSS choose to settle patent litigation. SFLC welcomes Red Hat’s efforts on the community’s behalf.”

1. Red Hat settled a patent lawsuit against them they did not do an agreement between companies without being sued.

2. From the agreement “derivative works of or combination products using covered products are protected from any patent claim based in any respect on the covered products.”

That does NOT only cover Red Hat customers, but anyone else using the code IAW the terms of the open source license.

3. They stipulated that RHEL was “NOT INFRINGING” … so they did not say that they needed patent protection or stipulate that the patent was infringed. Instead, the got that patent taken off the table for the open source community in relation to this code.

Not at all the same thing, not even close

I personally can’t stand Yast and try to nuke all installs of SLES at work here as soon as possible (except where SLES is required) after sucking off and moving the apps to Red Hat or CentOS.

If these kinds of things are shady, secret or otherwise evil is up for debate but Novell isn’t the only one doing them.

Maybe they could put their Enterprise SRPMS on a public website to.

Then, maybe, open source enthusiasts would get on their side.

Once that happens, their product will be recommended / installed by those open source enthusiasts.

Then their market share will increase.

Any open saucer worth their salt would be avoiding Novell and their shady and secret dealings with MS anyway.