[ale] Interesting note from the Wall Street Journal today

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 23:56 -0500, James P. Kinney III wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 11:04 -0500, Bob Toxen wrote:
> > Methinks that if M$ wanted to destroy Linux (beyond its FUD, politicing,
> > and incompatibility efforts) it would buy the largest Distro, Red Hat,
> > and shut it down.  If the other poster's estimate of $3B is correct,
> > that's a drop in the ocean for M$ and its ROI would pay for it within a
> > year.
> > 
> > I think, instead, that our World Domination efforts have paid off.
> > Linux is popular enough that M$'s anti-interoperability is starting to
> > backfire with major clients threatening to dump M$ entirely if it does
> > not play nice with Linux.  By picking a smaller vendor but one popular
> > in Europe, M$ still weakens Red Hat.
> 
> Good point. But I am cynical enough to see it from a different
> standpoint:
> 
> M$ funded the SCO debacle. They thought they could shut down Linux that
> way. But during the mess, it was revealed that the code SCO is claiming
> they "own" and thus is the core of the infringement is actually "owned"
> by Novell. Thus the M$ interest in Novell is not so much to sway it's
> big buyers into placation by actually offering better interoperability.
> If they are able to leverage a strategic partnership into a co-ownership
> of Novell code, they can require a license fee for the use of that code
> and effectively shut down RedHat and everyone else. Thus M$ can then
> claim the interoperability issue is _caused_ by Linux as they have
> "stolen" M$ property.
> 


Hrm.  Interesting.  I think it would prevent people from using future
code, but if the code currently out there is under an OSS license, and
Novell donated it, then charges can only apply to new distributed code
from Novell as of the date of the change.  I don't think that they can
rewrite history and attempt to collect things that were donated in the
past...

    -- Mike
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