Novell could be banned from selling Linux
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007As you should know, a couple of months ago Novell and Microsoft signed an agreement with the public aim of making GNU/Linux and Windows work together more easily.
From the free software community, many smelled another “Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish” implementation, the typical Microsoft tactic when it comes to be too difficult to defeat an enemy.
Now the Free Software Foundation, copyright holder of many key parts of the GNU/Linux operating system (gcc, just to give you an example), is considering to ban Novell from selling Foundation’s softwares.
The FSF will give an official announcement within two weeks.
Linux is 5% of the total annual revenue of Novell (that is almost one billion dollars). The agreement with Microsoft brought to Novell’s cash 350 million dollars. If the FSF will ban Novell, they will need to rewrite most of the code they can no longer use, eventually wasting all the money gathered from Microsoft.
And we’ll eventually hear a very loud “Ouch!” coming from the other side of the Atlantic ocean.
UPDATE
This is a story being hyped by the Reuters guy who wrote it.