Masie defends Microsoft deal

It's not the hackers or the coders or the kernel developers who have to deal with enterprise customer issues - it's companies like Novell.

That's the word from Stafford Masie, Novell SA's MD, who said in his keynote to NetCB's net.Share 2006 conference, in Pretoria, that enterprise customers were constantly asking Novell about the legal liability of the GNU general public licence (GPL).

"The number one question customers always ask us as we close a deal is: what's the legal liability associated with the GPL?" said Masie.

"As Linux, we are losing the battle in the enterprise because of the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with the legal challenge that Linux brings to the fore. People have asked us why we did this agreement when we already offer indemnification.

"But indemnification just says 'you're guilty, but we'll cover you for $150 million - but you're still guilty'. Customers don't like that. Indemnification is not amnesty - it doesn't remove the sin completely. You have a legal exposure, but Novell will cover it for $150 million. That's the problem with Linux in the enterprise now. Indemnification covers anyone who would knock on your door and say 'there's a piece of my code in that Linux and so you need to pay me so much per instance'."

As a result, said Masie, enterprise companies see a red flag when a Linux solution is offered.

"Linux isn't winning big because of this flag. A lot of the community members don't understand this: we are the salespeople for the Linux community. Novell sells Linux. At the end of the day we take Linux to the enterprise. We deal with the enterprise customers - not the hackers, not the coders, not the kernel developers. They don't see what the customers have issues with. So when we do deals like this, it's our job to articulate back to them why. We believe if we had a deal like this in place [with Microsoft] before, we would have won a 5 000-server SLES deal."

Masie said the discussion that culminated in last month's co-operative agreement with Microsoft had begun in March.

"We need to realise who Microsoft is - they own more than 90% of the desktop. To give customers peace of mind, you have to do an agreement like this with Microsoft. There is no other company with this footprint. This is a specific agreement with Microsoft that says they will not sue people that use SuSE Linux in the enterprise or develop for SuSE Linux. That is the essence of the legal aspect of this deal."

Masie also said his company had addressed the concerns raised by professor Derek Keats, of the University of the Western Cape, in an open letter.