Keats to monitor Novell-MS covenant

By Paul Vecchiatto for Novell
Cape Town, 07 Dec 2006

University of the Western Cape (UWC) IT professor Derek Keats will monitor the Novell-Microsoft covenant and would recommend dumping Novell's software if it proved to be against the spirit of open source.

"At the university, we have taken a stance to promote the use of free and open source software (FOSS). Over the past three years, we have taken the university from 90% proprietary usage to 90% use of open source systems. Moving from one open source system to another is fairly easy as the exit cost is small," he says.

Keats caused a stir about two weeks ago when he sent Novell SA a letter saying, in his personal capacity, he would recommend that all Novell products be eliminated from the university's inventory as the covenant agreed to between Novell and Microsoft was against the spirit of FOSS development.

A result of that letter was this morning's open forum, facilitated by the Cape IT Initiative, where Novell SA MD Stafford Masie addressed the Cape Town FOSS Forum.

Patent issue

Masie said while he doesn't agree with the way Keats' letter "surfaced", he does agree that it forced Novell to address the patent issue, a key point in the covenant, as it precluded Microsoft and Novell from suing each other's clients on possible patent infringements.

"The key objective for Novell, through its SUSE OSS, is that we are now bringing it to the enterprise. Enterprises like to manage risk and this agreement has them feeling more comfortable about Linux," he said.

Another key aspect of the covenant, according to Masie, is that of interoperability in that Microsoft Word documents can now be read in OpenOffice.

Keats says while he appreciated the commercial reasons for the covenant, there was still a feeling that it went against the spirit of open source - that of collaborative development.

"Part of the problem is we have a sick patent system, where a lot of software has been patented that should not have been. SA is particularly vulnerable because patents are only refused if they are challenged by someone," he says.

Moot point

Masie said he asked Novell for a statement on how the US firm plans to address the patent issue on a global basis.

Masie, however, also said Novell has undertaken to use its patent protections to protect itself and the broader open source community and it believes technology should provide the competitive-edge.

He also appealed to other open source distributors to investigate a similar covenant with Microsoft, if it made sense to them.

Brendan Huges, an e-lawyer with Michalsons Attorneys, says the discussion about patent protection in SA is a moot point.

"Software is protected under the Copyright Act, while patents are exclusively used for inventions. For instance, one cannot patent a book in SA and the law treats software in the same way," he says.