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Ballmer on the Novell deal


dexter11
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Hmmm....

My read is that SuSE is no longer going to be on my machine. ;) I really am intrigued by the concept of "properly paid" software. I think he means money, rather than listed in the credits. And again, the difference is not what customers want, but what Microsoft wants.

But there is a consistent note here. If anyone wants interoperability, you must pay for it, and pay Microsoft. I think it would be better to simply not use their products, or use them as little as possible.

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Balmer = :weird: and have always been :weird:

 

I think we'll see a massive boycutt of Suse and Novell from the linux world. Novell have just sold their soul to the devil.

Agreed but I think this is also the point....

Its divide and conquer... Suse will be a pariah and it has a lot of impressionable users (like the Ubuntu base) who only know Microshaft and Suse

 

Like SCO they will be shunned, made fun of and called MS fanboys etc. and I think this is what MS is paying for...

Novell will go the way of citrix, stacker et al.. used and cast off IP stolen from them.

 

They also get to split SAMBA... since many SAMBA devs work for Suse... so the idea will be to make sure samba only works with MS and Suse... and split the community.

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They also get to split SAMBA... since many SAMBA devs work for Suse... so the idea will be to make sure samba only works with MS and Suse... and split the community.

Maybe you missed this: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=36924

I was aware of the letter....

The point is how will this affect the team.... Will core devs have to leave SAMBA because they get paid by Novell?

What will happen to core devels who are exposed as part of their paying job at Suse exposed to MS source code. They can no longer develop for SAMBA because they have seen the MS code... SAMBA can not be clean if they have so at some point these devs will be forced to choose between SAMBA and working for MS/Novell

 

 

More importantly ... perhaps this is simply a trap.... that Novell might not even think about

 

[insert_tinfoil_hat]

Microsoft will leak some of its code into Novell, seemingly something Opensources but with a hidden patent and something very backdoor .. for instance a plug-in for Evolution ... which will *need* 2-3 lines of header in some library. This lib is then tainted... and 100's of other packages might also need that lib ...

 

Or the lib itself might be maintained by someone exposed to MS source code. Thus at some point in the future MS can turn round and claim IP over that library... claiming the developer had access to their source code and it is not a cleanroom lib.

 

Its one thing to work on OS in your spare time or even paid as part of a project ... but its very difficult to say no to an employer who asks you to look at some source code as part of your job with the excuse it taints you for OS development.

 

Let me put it it this way yourt married with 2 kids and a mortgage and work for Novell and get asked to attend a meeting on "Exchange integration" ... all MS have to do it stick up a slide for 10 secs with source code and you can never develop OS again in that area. MS don't even need to let you see it long enough to understand it .. they only need confirmation you saw their source code. They can even flash it up and apologise and say "oops wrong slide" and your screwed... MS lawyer walks in staged at end of meeting and says "I hear there was an accident and we showed some source by mistake... I need everyone to sign non disclosure agreements...

 

What do you do ? How will refusing affect your job with your employer? Are you going to call your wife and ask "sweetheart, how are your career prospects... I just saw some code from MS and if I don't sign an agreement saying I saw it Novell are going to fire me...can we pay the mortgage on your salary. ?"

[/insert_tinfoil_hat]

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Microsoft is a proven sleezball. SuSE is simply dead meat. It is ironic that one of the more successful distros, at least from a marketing and distribution perspective, is the one targeted by Microsleeze. No tinfoil hat needed. Your head is buried in the ground if you don't get it! :lol2:

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They also get to split SAMBA... since many SAMBA devs work for Suse... so the idea will be to make sure samba only works with MS and Suse... and split the community.

Maybe you missed this: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=36924

I was aware of the letter....

The point is how will this affect the team.... Will core devs have to leave SAMBA because they get paid by Novell?

What will happen to core devels who are exposed as part of their paying job at Suse exposed to MS source code. They can no longer develop for SAMBA because they have seen the MS code... SAMBA can not be clean if they have so at some point these devs will be forced to choose between SAMBA and working for MS/Novell

Well yes. But if they stick to their word they can choose to leave Novell and join to another distro. Samba is a core component of every enterprise and some non-enterprise distro. They can find another job very easely IMHO.

More importantly ... perhaps this is simply a trap.... that Novell might not even think about

 

[insert_tinfoil_hat]

Microsoft will leak some of its code into Novell, seemingly something Opensources but with a hidden patent and something very backdoor .. for instance a plug-in for Evolution ... which will *need* 2-3 lines of header in some library. This lib is then tainted... and 100's of other packages might also need that lib ...

 

Or the lib itself might be maintained by someone exposed to MS source code. Thus at some point in the future MS can turn round and claim IP over that library... claiming the developer had access to their source code and it is not a cleanroom lib.

 

Its one thing to work on OS in your spare time or even paid as part of a project ... but its very difficult to say no to an employer who asks you to look at some source code as part of your job with the excuse it taints you for OS development.

 

Let me put it it this way yourt married with 2 kids and a mortgage and work for Novell and get asked to attend a meeting on "Exchange integration" ... all MS have to do it stick up a slide for 10 secs with source code and you can never develop OS again in that area. MS don't even need to let you see it long enough to understand it .. they only need confirmation you saw their source code. They can even flash it up and apologise and say "oops wrong slide" and your screwed... MS lawyer walks in staged at end of meeting and says "I hear there was an accident and we showed some source by mistake... I need everyone to sign non disclosure agreements...

 

What do you do ? How will refusing affect your job with your employer? Are you going to call your wife and ask "sweetheart, how are your career prospects... I just saw some code from MS and if I don't sign an agreement saying I saw it Novell are going to fire me...can we pay the mortgage on your salary. ?"

[/insert_tinfoil_hat]

Seriously, anyone or any company puts GPL'ed code into a program the software remains GPL'ed. If they change their mind the old codebase is still GPL'ed. That's the main point of GPL. But of course you aware of this. The responsibility of putting something patented into a software is the person's who gave the code. In other words if MS suddenly realizes they made a mistake they can only delete the code they put into the program, nothing else they can do. Besides I don't think that open source programs don't violate any software patents. In fact I think there are already thousands of software patents are violated, just noone cares until you don't get a dime out of it.

AFAIk intellectual property as a legal term does not exists. Anyone knows what it exactly means at all? It's a blury mixture of patents, processes, ideas etc. But if you start to use this term in a court you'll be thrown out very shortly. It sounds very good on press conferences but that's all. It's the invention of the marketing people.

So if there's a trap it's more hidden or more complecated or both.

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dextrer reread what I said...

 

In summary if you have seen one line of code for windows you can NEVER develop for Opensource ..EVER...

 

Because OpenSource is ...open MS only has to find 1-2 lines of code which are close in 1 million lines of code.

It then claims you copied them (whether you did or not is irrelevant unless you have a spare 50-100 million dollars floating about you don't really need because MS can afford to take you to court and loose 100 million dollars if it screws linux...

 

and if they loose they will just take it to appeal....

 

Yes noone knows exactly what the outcome is... the judge will probably know nothing about programming anyway but non of that matters unless you can play poker with Bill Gates and win....

Its impossible for me or you to play poker against Bill Gates

 

you can have 4 aces and he will just raise you 50 billion...and if you don't have 50 billion you loose regardless.

 

This is the court process... MS don't fight court battles on correctness or legality they fight it on no limit poker rules.

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For there to be a legal basis for a lawsuit regarding code there has to be some sustenance to the code, a concept or method as it is often described, which has been copied and could not have been come up with in the same way. i.e., you can't claim IP infringement based on:

for (i=0;i++;i<10)

This is common code, you have to have an obvious IP claim over the concept and/or method, and it has to be implemented in the same manner, for it to be even considered for an IP case. They can fight it however they want, but as we've seen in the SCO v. IBM, they court isn't about to let anyone make baseless claims. Even MS couldn't get away with it - if they could have, they would have helped SCO in a manner other than sliding them the cash to help fund their FUD.

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Yes but there are only so many ways you can do something when it relates to interoperabillity...

 

Since we started on Samba ... samba needs CIFS support... so the algorithms have to be within certain parameters... so only so much variation is likely...

 

When I worked in one job I often had to reverse engineer software to fix faults or work out why it wasn't working. The SW Im talking about read files of a known format ... that varied within bounds.(an industry standard)..so sometimes the SW was unable to read a specific format...

 

There are basically only so many ways to do it.... and usually one simplest way..

 

A good friend of mine works for the vendor btw... and I had quite a few of my own programs which I used to replace parts of the vendors with .. completely written from scratch and reverse engineered ...he had access to the source code and the two were pretty much the same...

 

When your dealing with a standard format the chances of the code being very similar are high...

and if Im having probs convincing you guys then think how hard to convince a judge.... (pre-trial)

 

As an example I would bet that khtml and gecko are really very similar... they both render html and though mozilla often does a better job ad bad html this is nit the core part but the html-tidy plug-in...

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I switched from SuSE to Mandriva earlier this year because of early problems updating SuSE 10.1.

 

I'm GLAD I switched to Mandriva! :)

 

I would like to be 100% completely free of Microsoft, however Comcast (Cable ISP in the U.S.) doesn't support Linux and I've been advised to keep a Windows partition in case of network connection problems.

Edited by edwardp
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I have worked with Comcast and there is nothing about it that excludes Linux. Well, except their techs, that really don't even understand networking! :lol:

 

I am very disappointed with SuSE. I have used it a couple of times and found it very nice. Oh, well, more opportunity for other distros to step up.

 

Alas, poor SuSE. We knew it well!

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