Thus far, I have deliberately not said anything about Novell’s partnership with Microsoft. I am after all a distro developer myself and I consider it very bad form to criticize other distro’s – I have always rather chosen to focus on what I believe OpenLab does right instead (whereas the founder of another distro actually sent a mail to the opensuze mailinglist announcing in effect ‘now that your distro sucks even more, why not try ours’).
Nevertheless, something with such a massive impact on the entire community cannot be completely ignored. Rather then, than my own opinions, I share with you the following letter, sent by Professor Derek Keats of the University of the Western Cape to Novell SA CEO Stafford Masie.
Professor Keats shared the mail with the South African anti-software patent mailing list, and gave permission to share it further.
Dear Stafford,
This is a personal email from me, not an official policy of UWC.
However, as the custodian of IT at UWC, I will be pursuing a full
investigation into a total exit strategy for all Novell products from
the University of the Western Cape.
As a non-trivial CUSTOMER of Novell, we will be looking at all our
Novell applications during the next 3-4 months, with a view to finding
the fastest possible way to get ALL NOVELL PRODUCTS completely out of
our environment. As a company that we have been customers of for over a
decade, Novell has let us down badly, and as customers, you may expect
us to vote with our feet and encourage others within the education
domain to do the same.
As noted by Bruce Perens, it is abundantly clear that Novell and
Microsoft took the time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing
covenants to each other’s customers, rather than licenses to each other,
in order to circumvent Novell’s earlier agreement with the community of
GPL software developers.
UWC both produces and depends on GPL licensed software, just like
Novell, and as the custodian of our work in this area, I find the
approach taken by Novell to be devoid of merit in relation to us as both
customers and producers.
As customers, you have failed to consider you ability as a company to
supply us with a quality product in the face of a significant percentage
of GPL licensed software owners moving from the GPL in its current
version to GPL Version 3, which will leave Novell products such as Suse
linux without access to upgrades and new versions of the software. This
includes important software like SAMBA, on which we rely for some key
operational functionality. Given that many other software producers are
stating their intentions to move to GPL V3, the quality of Novell
software will be compromised. As producers of software, you have forced
our hand. You leave us no choice but to consider the GPL version 3 for
our own software as well, in order to protect ourselves from
unscrupulous companies willing to betray their customers as Novell has
done.
I cannot guarantee that I will be able to extricate UWC from Novell, but
I can guarantee that I will try.
Technorati Tags: Novell, Microsoft, OpenLab
