Will Canonical Jump Into Bed With MS?

Post by **dann** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 8:49 am

Novell, Xandros and now Linspire have all signed agreements with Microsoft that include patent indemnification for users of their technologies. Who do you think is next?

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 8:55 am

Maybe there is something to the patent FUD after all. If true, M$ will go around and basically strong arm everyone in the industry. The right thing to do would cite the patent infringements with specific examples so the community can make the necessary changes.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 8:58 am

I personally think Mandriva, because they are already quite happy about violating the GPL by including binary-only, proprietary kernel drivers, and including tons of proprietary userspace software (No GPL violation here).

I don't think you need to worry about Canonical doing a deal like this, please remember that Ubuntu is a community distribution. Canonical, as far as I know, havn't employed hundreds of people to work on Ubuntu full time, so they depend heavily on the community, and if they a deal with Microsoft, it would just kill them. It would be like a newly made katana to their throat.

And also, I do that think Mark Shuttleworth has more ethics that Kevin Carmony and Ron Hovsepian.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:03 am

Red Hat has a lot of corperate companies in their pockets so I think they will be the next.

Post by **dann** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:06 am

I wonder about Red Hat. If they go would this cause an avalanche of other distros to follow suite? Very weighty influence they could have.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:15 am

CptnObvious999 wrote:Red Hat has a lot of corperate companies in their pockets so I think they will be the next.

dann wrote:I wonder about Red Hat. If they go would this cause an avalanche of other distros to follow suite? Very weighty influence they could have.

I personally don't think Red Hat will do this, first of all, when Novell did their deal, Red Hat came out and lambasted it and claimed to never do such a thing. Sure that might have been a smart move to gain some good faith in the community, but it's not something to leave out I think.
Also, as Max Spevack said on last week's show, if Red Hat did do such a deal, all of Red Hat's engineering staff would likely quit immediately, especially guys like Alan Cox, who believes quite strongly in the ideals of free software (Red Hat has a whole bunch of those guys).

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:51 am

I doubt Red Hat would ever do something like this. It's not in their nature. They are a dyed-in-the wool F/OSS company. Just watch Michael Tiemann in Revolution OS. My LUG meets at the Red Hat offices and all sorts of Red Hat employees hang out and talk shop and you can just tell that F/OSS is part of their core. You can never say never, of course, but I think it's highly unlikely they would enter into this type of deal.

Now, Mandriva on the other hand, is probably an excellent candidate to be the next one to fall.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 2:00 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:I personally think Mandriva, because they are already quite happy about violating the GPL by including binary-only, proprietary kernel drivers, and including tons of proprietary userspace software (No GPL violation here).

From the comments regarding this week's DistroWatch weekly (comment # 56):

Adam Williamson wrote: We will make an official statement very shortly stating that we have absolutely no plans to sign any kind of patent deal with Microsoft. This is the rough version of the text I got from our CEO (which will be cleaned up before we put it out officially):

"As far as patent protection is concerned, we are not great fans of software patents which we consider as counter productive. We also believe what we see, and until we see hard evidence from, say, SCO or Microsoft, that there are pieces of codes in our software that infringe existing patents, we will assume that any other announcement is just FUD. So we don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job."

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 2:08 pm

Judland wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:I personally think Mandriva, because they are already quite happy about violating the GPL by including binary-only, proprietary kernel drivers, and including tons of proprietary userspace software (No GPL violation here).
From the comments regarding this week's DistroWatch weekly (comment # 56):

Adam Williamson wrote: We will make an official statement very shortly stating that we have absolutely no plans to sign any kind of patent deal with Microsoft. This is the rough version of the text I got from our CEO (which will be cleaned up before we put it out officially):

"As far as patent protection is concerned, we are not great fans of software patents which we consider as counter productive. We also believe what we see, and until we see hard evidence from, say, SCO or Microsoft, that there are pieces of codes in our software that infringe existing patents, we will assume that any other announcement is just FUD. So we don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job."

OK, fair enough, good going on the Mandriva folks' part, now if they would just stop violating the GPL, I'll stop ragging on them.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 2:20 pm

Remember not to feed the Trolls, folks!

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 2:22 pm

Judland wrote:Remember not to feed the Trolls, folks!

ROFL! Nice one!

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 5:02 pm

A more "official" word on Mandriva's stance... here.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 10:07 pm

Judland wrote:A more "official" word on Mandriva's stance... here.

I gotta hand it to Mandriva, that's a nice reply:
"So we don’t believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone."

I really like the analogy of comparing Microsoft to the mafia, quite fitting if you ask me!

Post by **dann** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 7:26 am

I'm glad to hear Mandriva's stance on the ip protection service offerred by MS. I'm wondering who could be left to make such a deal? I have heard people thinking Mepis might make the jump but I really doubt it having talked with Warren in the past. I cannot see him doing that. With the hardware and embedded device manufacturers in Asia signing agreements could Turbo Linux be next? Or maybe RedFlag Linux? China could give a damn about IP infringement, though.

This does not leave much. If caldera were still alive I could see them or Corel Linux, but they are long gone, thang goodness.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 10:14 am

I've read Shuttleworth's blog entry on the same subject.

I'm most likely being biased, but I feel that François Bancilhon's statement is much more definite and draws a much clearer "line in the sand".

In my opinion, there's many more shades of gray in Shuttleworth's declaration and is a little too diplomatic and long winded for my taste.

thelinuxlink.net

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Will Canonical Jump Into Bed With MS?