Will Canonical Jump Into Bed With MS?

[Tsuroerusu]

If caldera were still alive I could see them or Corel Linux, but they are long gone, thang goodness.

You mean Xandros?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xandros
"Founded in May of 2001, the company is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. Their distributions are based on Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which was acquired along with the development team behind the product from Corel Corporation in August 2001 after Corel decided to leave the Linux distribution market.[2] Xandros is also a founding member of the Desktop Linux Consortium."

[schotty]

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.

Although I like the pinache that Mandriva emotes, Canonical was not shy or beating around the bush on this one. They flat out said maybe to licensing technology, no if there is any threat whatsoever of patent suits and monkeyboy's shenanigans.

I have no problem with him (or anyone else) getting a codec licensed from MS to do Zune, WMA, and WMV interoperability. But the constant threat of suing any company involved with linux is retarded. To me, MS gets what it deserves from all the linux shops that vowed war. Its the Novell's of the world that are acting like pussies and need to get douched, cuz they smell ... bad.

[Judland]

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.

Hmmmm..... so far my "Spidey Senses" have served me pretty well.

Red Hat CEO says he talked patents with Microsoft

In an interview with Reuters, Szulik declined to say whether his company is now in negotiations with Microsoft over signing such a patent agreement.

"I can't answer the question," he said.

[Tsuroerusu]

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.

Hmmmm..... so far my "Spidey Senses" have served me pretty well.

Red Hat CEO says he talked patents with Microsoft

In an interview with Reuters, Szulik declined to say whether his company is now in negotiations with Microsoft over signing such a patent agreement.

"I can't answer the question," he said.

Well, like Max Spevack said during the recent interview, if Red Hat did such a deal, half of Red Hat's engineers would probably quit immediately. Also, maybe it was Microsoft that approached Red Hat, and Red Hat might just have listened to what Microsoft had to say or something like that.

Unless Red Hat actually does do some Novell-style patent deal, I'm gonna trust them not to, and if they do, I'll just switch to OpenBSD!

[Chess]

I think this has been reported previously. I think shortly after the Novell deal came out Red Hat said they had talked to Microsoft but rejected the offer due to the patent provisions.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2059675,00.asp

"Mark Webbink, Red Hat's deputy general counsel, has all but ruled out any similar agreement with Microsoft, telling eWEEK that "we do not believe there is a need, or basis, for the type of relationship defined in the Microsoft-Novell announcement."

However, Red Hat "has and will continue to work with Microsoft on true interoperability and open standards in the way we did in advising them in the development of their Open Specification Promise," he said. "

November 15, 2006

I know that's not exactly the same thing, but reading between the lines, coupled with something else I remember reading something on the RH site, too, but can't find at the moment, seemed to indicate the parties had talked but that was it.

Update: Here we go. This was one of the articles I remember reading before:

http://www.informationweek.com/showArti ... =194400885

"Thursday, Microsoft's Ballmer said that the Redmond, Wash. developer was ready to cut a deal with Red Hat similar to the one it struck with Linux seller Novell last week. "We are willing to do the same deal with Red Hat Linux and other Linux distributors," Ballmer was quoted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer during a Q&A at an SQL database conference.

...

Friday, Red Hat brushed off Ballmer."

Nov 17, 2006

[Judland]

If I were a Red Hat / Fedora user, I'd be concerned about the "can't answer that question" comment. That's the info. I was trying to pass along.

[Tsuroerusu]

If I were a Red Hat / Fedora user, I'd be concerned about the "can't answer that question" comment.

Yeah that I also think was a little odd, but you know companies always keep stuff like that secret.

[Judland]

Yeah that I also think was a little odd, but you know companies always keep stuff like that secret.

Not all of them. I think Mandriva's position on this matter is quite clear.

[greggh]

Shuttleworth...

Allegations of “infringement of unspecified patents” carry no weight whatsoever. We don’t think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/127


The last part of that second sentence is nauseating to me. I still don't trust Mark at all. He'll do whatever it takes to advance Ubuntu, and continue to justify the actions as unfortunate temporary necessary evils to bring Linux to the masses. But really, the guy is all about the money and the ego. IMHO

[Chess]

I used to practice a tiny bit of securities law, but am certainly no expert, but I would not take anything the CEO of a publicly-traded US company to mean much, if anything.

These publicly-traded companies, and the officers that represent them, are subject to intense scrutiny under US securities laws. CEO's, especially after Sarbanes-Oxley, walk on eggshells whenever making any public statement about stuff going on within the company, lest any investor take their words to mean one thing or the other and suffer financial harm by guessing wrong. Furthermore, there are specific times when CEO's really cannot say anything about present doings one way or the other, such as during certain blackout dates prior to new stock issuances, or stock splits, stock option grants, or the like.

For example, suppose Szulik knows that there is no patent deal pending with Microsoft, and suppose he also knows that certain quarters of the investment community (who don't know anything about free software) think that's bad -- in other words, some people think Novell's deal is a good thing -- and further suppose that Szulik is about to purchase some addtional stock or is about to be issued some additional stock options. Well, if he knows that saying there is no patent deal will lower RH's stock, and if he has already filed the paperwork to purchase some stock or be granted some new options at a certain price, then making a public statement about no patent deals might benefit him by lowering RH's stock in the short term -- even if the statement about no patent deal is true. It could look bad, even if no harm was meant. If he gets issued options with a strike price that has been lowered due to a recent statement he made about no patent deals, then he could be in big trouble.

In this case, Szulik basically said "no comment" which really means nothing. I am not a RH or Fedora user, but I would not read much into this. Of course, you can never say never, so RH might announce something tomorrow, but at least based on past history, I find it highly unlikely.

Anyway, just another take on this.

[Tsuroerusu]

He'll do whatever it takes to advance Ubuntu, and continue to justify the actions as unfortunate temporary necessary evils to bring Linux to the masses.

That's a fairly good description, if there's one thing Ubuntu is good at it's GPL violations.

I used to practice a tiny bit of securities law,

AHH!! There's a lawyer in here! RUN!!!

Just kidding Chess, couldn't resist that one.

I am not a RH or Fedora user, but I would not read much into this. Of course, you can never say never, so RH might announce something tomorrow, but at least based on past history, I find it highly unlikely.

Yeah, same here. I mean if Red Hat would choose GNOME (Which was not ready for production) over KDE (Which had had it's first stable release), because Qt wasn't free software at the time, why would they want to do a patent deal. Sure this was a long time ago, but it shows that Red Hat's nature really is with free software, I mean Novell has non-free stuff as part of SLES and SLED 10, as far as I know there is no non-free stuff in RHEL, except for Red Hat's trademarked artwork.