Obviously Microsoft has no motive in this except increased
revenue/marketshare/what have you.
For Novell, there are two possible options:
1) They really are altruistic and they really think that somehow a
deal like this will be a Good Thing for Free Software.
For this hypothesis to be true, several other things also have to be
true. For one, *nobody* in Novell's situation believes that MS is
offering them a deal like this out of the goodness of their hearts.
You don't stay alive as long as Novell has by handing your cow over to
the first guy with some magic beans. Novell *has* to know that MS has
some purpose for this deal other than what has been stated. So, in
this instance, Novell thinks it has a pretty good idea about what the
ulterior motive is, and is betting that it has an ace up its sleeve
that will ward off the impending doom. If this is the case, good
luck, and may Novell succeed where nearly all have failed.
2) They're selling out their customers for a temporary gain. They
know, guess, or have been told what MS plans, but have reached an
acceptable price for the instillation of apathy.
This seems the more likely hypothesis to me. Would an organization
like Novell gamble all its investments into GNU/Linux, the Ximian
projects, the Mono project, etc., on a chance at being able to subvert
a guessed potential maneuver by historically the most successfully
devious entity in the software industry? Unlikely. As has been
conjectured before, even in this thread, the acquisitions of SuSE and
Ximian may not have been enough to stop the bleeding from the
amputation of the Netware-related products. Perhaps Novell has
decided that its only path to survival leads to becoming a Microsoft
subsidiary.
And what is Microsoft's sinister ulterior motive? Of the conjectures
I've heard, educated and otherwise, the most logical in my opinion is
that of a lever to overturn the GPL. MS now has a patent agreement
with a huge distributor of GPL software, and could easily use it to
further muddy the waters around "intellectual property"
(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml) and how the GPL and
software distributed under it relates to existing patent and copyright
law. If MS is successful in this venture, it could easily become the
sole authorized legal distributor of GNU/Linux, making the Debian
Project, other distributors, and users of these distributions illegal
code pirates who are stealing the work of honest developers. DRM
would almost certainly become an integral part of the "official"
kernel, vendor hardware support would become solely targeted at the
"official" kernel, interoperability would get soundly broken, and
renegade kernel forks would soon get left behind.
-- Tcsh: Now with higher FPS! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:08:52 EDT