Interesting post: The morning after Microsoft/Novell deal

Sun’s main selling point for Solaris was that it offered “patent protection” for its customers, as opposed the “risk” of going to Linux. http://m.news.com/Sun+plans+patent+protection+for+open-source+Solaris/2163-7344_3-5456451.html. Sun’s patent agreements with SCO and Microsoft secured that claim.

Now Novell makes a similar agreement with Microsoft, offering the patent protection to its Linux customers – a great benefit these customers and a blow to Sun’s strategy. No wonder Sun’s Simon Phipps is crying foul and spreading FUD.

It’s actually really good for the consumer that I.T. companies grow up and get a long and not act like children.

Hey, I didn’t say stop competiting, hell no! The business market swings to the positive and then the business edge is all about innovation and not some dirty war of words that get us all no where.

@Fernando: Exactly which part of my blog do you take issue with? I suggest you use my comments area to tell me rather than clogging Robert’s. Sun is able to offer its customers full indemnity on Solaris because it has all the rights to the source, nothing terribly unusual about that.

On the other hand, Novell just did a deal with Microsoft that is completely inexplicable as most of us think that there’s no case to answer with Microsoft concerning patents and Linux, and my blog outlines the negative implications of it to balance all the shallow reprocessing of the press release that has been going on. In my view the only FUD, sir, is you accusing me of FUD because I work for Sun

@Simon, I prefer the comments section here, if Robert don’t mind.

I don’t dispute Sun has full rights of the Solaris source – after reportedly buying a UNIX license from SCO, and doing a cross-patent licensing with Microsoft. And I think there is no dispute that Sun used this idemnity as a selling point for Solaris against Linux.

So it is highly hypocritical for a Sun employee to say now there is no case to answer to Microsoft concerning patents and Linux, when Sun is marketing its OS against Linux based exactly on “full indemnity”. Is Sun ready to say there is no patent problem with Linux and as such there is no advantage in having Sun Solaris idemnity?

Fernando: I don’t mind.

Actually, Sun bought the full rights to Unix in 1994, it had nothing to do with SCO (who, as assigns of the Unix rights, did indeed sell fixes and updates to all Unix licensees, as Novell and AT & T had before them) or Microsoft (who have no claim to Unix as far as I know). And yes, it continues to be the case that one of the values this offers Sun is that Sun is not questioned about its right to ship Unix, so is able to offer customers the security that claims will not arise, and that if they did Sun would sort them out in the same way it protected the Java community against the spurious claims Kodak made. This is just a fundamental of business, regardless of the sector: sell what you own, so that others can’t claim you’re in the wrong, right or not.

Where, exactly, is the hypocrisy in this? Sun secured the rights to Unix long ago, as a purchase from the legitimate rights holder, not in response to patent claim (in fact software patents were a non-issue in 1994). Sun did this because it holds a core belief that code matters and so certainty over its ownership matters too. In doing so, Sun did not imply anyone else was at risk, nor did Sun validate the spurious claims of a convicted monopolist or agree to pay them royalties on software that doesn’t belong to them. I have no idea what rights problems the Linux kernel might have and have no comment on the subject – the problem with Novell’s actions is that, by paying ongoing royalties to Microsoft, they imply that they think there are such problems. That’s what my blog was about.

With regard to the rest of the GNU-related userland, Sun clearly thinks there are negligible risks since Sun contributes deeply and widely to that software and ships it as a part of Solaris, without paying a cent to Microsoft for the right to do so. Without Sun the userland most GNU/Linux users enjoy would be a much impoverished place, since Sun has contributed to more of the code than any other entity and continues to do so, not least in Mozilla, GNOME, X and OpenOffice.org.

Plenty more in the comments on my blog, which frankly would be a better place to discuss my blog posting than Robert’s link to it.

[By the way, since I don't get notified of responses to comments here you can expect a delay in hearing back from me unless you e-mail me, webmink {at} gmail.com]

With the wide variety of patent disputes cuurently in our industry over the last few years, this agreement creates a great process that takes intellectual property into consideration and patents. It also encourages collaboration and removes the threat of litigation.

Despite the claims by some elements of the open source community that OSS is a religion or a way of life, it’s a commercial business model. One that has attained a great deal of success, as proven by the important deal.

Mr. T: If Novell didn’t have patents, this deal would never have happened.