A lot has been written about the Justice Department's decision in the CPTN acquisition deal, part of the sale of Novell to Attachmate, which involves patents related to Linux.
One key point is missing from everything I've read so far.
Governments, in both Europe and North America, have given official approval to the idea of Linux as free and open source, now and forever, one and inseparable.
While the announcement of the deal came from the U.S., Florian Mueller notes that it was made in close cooperation with Germany's Federal Cartel Office (FCO; German name: "Bundeskartellamt"). That's important. It means the deal will have truly global reach, that there won't be an opportunity for Microsoft or Novell to run to some other jurisdiction and muddy the waters.
The deal is not formally done, but the idea is that Oracle, EMC, Apple and Microsoft, which are the partners in CPTN, won't be able to do any legal mischief with the patents they are acquiring. The bomb has been defused.
It's the first time in my memory that the General Public License (GPL) has been mentioned, specifically, and with approval by a government agency. The deal says the patents must be transferred in accordance with GPL v.2. There had been concerns that Microsoft might use the patents to go after Linux, or EMC (which owns VMWare) might use them to go after other virtualization vendors, but both governments here say no to that.
This is a watershed moment. The GPL has been endorsed by name, open source has been protected by name, and a patent market has been stopped from abusing open source by executive action.
This statement is also evidence of cooperation between European and American authorities that could become a model going forward. Having one general set of rules to follow is something all big tech companies have long sought, and will welcome. You can see that as the bone thrown the CPTN partners, but it may prove the most important point in all of this.
(The picture? Just a history lesson.)
Big Linux deployments have reached the point where it’s become a real problem for administrators that they don’t have nice tools to manage their servers and desktops. I don’t expect to go hungry if I decide to leave,but Linux looks pretty good in many places as well.
Big Linux deployments have reached the point where it’s become a real problem for administrators that they don’t have nice tools to manage their servers and desktops. I don’t expect to go hungry if I decide to leave,but Linux looks pretty good in many places as well.