burningquestion , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Even at the time Novell’s decision to pay out the protection money made sense from a business perspective. They could have been sued for liabilities that couldn’t even be guesstimated up front. Microsoft was being deliberately vague about which several hundred patents they claimed Linux was infringing. Even if Novell were in the right, it’s still generally the smartest idea for a company to stay out of court. Winning in court can still be extremely expensive. And they might not necessarily win even if they’re “right.”

And, as mentioned, SUSE had different ownership at the time, so it’s not terribly clear what bearing this history has on SUSE today.

Everyone freaked out at the time because it looked like it set a bad precedent that was going to ruin Linux, but it didn’t happen. It just didn’t. Steve Ballmer finally retired and Microsoft stopped acting like it was run by a sweaty gym coach and, like you said, MS eventually gave up the patent portfolio.

In the end, it turned out Red Hat were the bad guys because they eventually turned around and sold to IBM who are now actually trying to make their business model as proprietary as possible.

This notion that they didn’t batten down for a legal battle that could have conceivably destroyed the ability of Linux to be distributed at all and just paid the money was some kind of cOnSpiRaCy is just… systemd-hater level weird.