Kill the patents, kill the problem
Novell's decision to acquire Suse back in 2003 was a smart move for a struggling company. Having seen the market lead of its NDS directory product gradually eroded by Microsoft's Active Directory alternative and Windows NT, Novell was a company looking for an identity. Buying a way into the open-source community helped it plug right back into the zeitgeist — and more importantly, made Wall Street sit up and take notice again.
Four years on, Novell is still in the game — albeit not at the level it once enjoyed. Although results for the first quarter of this year show that revenue from Linux products was up by 46 percent compared to a year ago, the company as a whole is just about breaking even. The high-level partnership with Microsoft announced last year provided a short-term injection of cash and tackled some integration issues for businesses looking to marry Linux with Windows. The open-source community was not impressed by some of those issues, consisting as they did of Microsoft's unsubstantiated claims of Linux's software-patent infringement.
Some details of the Microsoft pact have emerged, thanks to a SEC filing made by Novell late on Friday; the timing, just before a holiday weekend, raising suspicions that bad news was being buried. The main thing to emerge is that Novell has conceded that changes to the latest version of the General Public License (GPL) — the licence that underpins the use and distribution of much open-source software — could prevent a key part of its pact with Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft could see a high-profile and costly deal with an open-source player damaged may explain why the software giant has been on the patent offensive of late.
Last week's announcement of a deal with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to fight patents has been seen by some as a damage limitation effort by Novell with the aim of winning back friends from the open-source community. That's a cynical view — moreover, one that's unhelpful. Only open source's opponents will benefit from splits in the community. Whatever Novell's motivations in its dealing with Microsoft and subsequently with the EFF, the fact remains that if software patents are shown to be the harmful and counterproductive mistake we believe them to be, the industry will benefit in many ways. The community must remain united with this in mind. Nothing else matters.