If the devil is in the details, this man is a saint
Tuesday Dec 12, 2006
Bigger-picture CEO of Active Grid, (and former Sun employee) Peter Yared recently offered
his
own perspective on the Novell-Microsoft detail. If we, in the mot
du jour, parse,
what the Mr Yared was saying, it boils down to this.
Critics of the deal don't understand what is good for open source and
the IT market. In fact, it represents a maturing of the sector, that
Microsoft is "learning to play well with others" and compete on more
equal terms.
I am not sure I agree with what Mr Yared wrote. Firstly, and most
perhaps most trivially, Yared casts some FUD in the direction of
NetBeans contrasting this deal with the Microsoft antitrust settlement
with Sun of a few years ago:
It [the antitrust settlement] did not, however, cover
open-source developers. So let's say you
download an open-source project like the NetBeans tool from Sun, add
some cool features and redistribute your version of the tool. You have
now violated hundreds of Microsoft patents on tools, and they can come
after you.
You see, the Novell-Microsoft deal included a statement that Microsoft
wouldn't assert patent rights against non-commercial developers (and
Microsoft helpfully clarified that this meant people who are not
employed to write software, but that this did not apply to any software
works they may create). The irrelevance of this seems to have escaped
Mr Yared. No major corporation is going to spend a lot of money to take
a non-commercial developer to court. They will almost certainly assert
any patent claims against any commercial distribution or use of the
resulting software.
More materially to Mr Yared's argument, is the claim that that the deal
is about competition, with Linux vendors getting to terms with
Microsoft:
The reality of the technology business is that virtually every deal
between big companies includes bilateral patent protection. Company A
cross-licenses its patents with Company B. Neither acknowledges that
the other is ripping off any intellectual property. Rather, each now
has a finger on a legal atomic football that threatens to blow
up both businesses if either goes to court to litigate for some bogus
market advantage.
And if you're uncertain of what an atomic football looks like, here's a
picture:
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| £4.00 from JJB Sports |
Mixed-metaphors aside, I think we understand the model. We're talking about a stand-off of companies with large patent portfolios all agreeing not to use them to disrupt eachothers' business. But it is here that Mr Yared loses touch with the press release.
A lot of people are saying Novell is paying "royalties" to Microsoft. Microsoft is paying Novell $108 million for Novell's patents, and Novell is paying Microsoft $40 million for Microsoft's patents. Or if you can do simple math, Microsoft is paying Novell $68 million for the patent agreement and then hundreds of millions more for Novell Suse Linux licenses and marketing expenses. Novell definitely came out on top here.
Well...yes, a lot of people are saying that Novell is paying "royalties" to Microsoft incluing Microsoft and, er, Novell, in their press release annoucing the deal:
Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.
So this is most assuredly not a one-off cross-license deal as Mr Yared represents it, but an ongong royalty payment from Novell to Microsoft on open source products, which Novell presumably thought would garner some "bogus market advantage", as Mr Yared would put it. Whatever Novell's subsequent protestations, there is an implication that open source vendors with a similar product portfolio are somehow beholden to Microsoft. Mr Yared seems unaware of this, otherwise how could he write that it is good for open source?
The use of massive libraries of patents used by corporations (even if used defensively) on their own behalf is hardly something to celebrate, and hardly good for open source. It is another barrier to entry to the market, and reduces competition on what should be one of the most level of playing fields. By Mr Yared's logic, it would be very hard for a new company to enter the market for distributing GNU/Linux operating systems unless that company already had a vast patent portfolio, and that's even ignoring (as Mr Yared apparently does) the ongoing royalty payments.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer.
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The whole deal is supposed to have a general chilling effect, however, and as such is probably effective.
The "atomic football" is not really a mixed metaphor, but an apparently mangled phrase. He meant a "nuclear football," which works well in context (imho).
Posted by Toby on December 12, 2006 at 03:31 PM GMT-01:00 #