Letter to Novell

[Robert Schumann]

For those indignant at the Novell situation, take heart that some Novell customers are making their voices heard. This letter is from the head of IT at a university in South Africa.

Does anyone know of comparable statements from organisations in the UK?

Robert.


-------- Forwarded Message --------

> From: Derek Keats <dkeats@hidden>
> Reply-To: dkeats@hidden
> To: Idlelo <idlelo2@hidden>
> Subject: [Idlelo2] Letter to Novell CEO in South Africa regarding
> Novel/Microsoft	agreement
> Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 10:16:02 +0200
>
> Dear colleagues,
>         Below is the text of a letter that I have sent to Stafford
>         Masie, CEO of Novell in South Africa. Feel free to share it.
> Regards
> Derek
>
>
> Dear Stafford,
>
> This is a personal email from me, not an official policy of UWC.
> However, as the custodian of IT at UWC, I will be pursuing a full
> investigation into a total exit strategy for all Novell products from
> the University of the Western Cape.
>
> As a non-trivial CUSTOMER of Novell, we will be looking at all our
> Novell applications during the next 3-4 months, with a view to finding
> the fastest possible way to get ALL NOVELL PRODUCTS completely out of
> our environment. As a company that we have been customers of for over a
> decade, Novell has let us down badly, and as customers, you may expect
> us to vote with our feet and encourage others within the education
> domain to do the same.
>
> As noted by Bruce Perens, it is abundantly clear that Novell and
> Microsoft took the time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing
> covenants to each other's customers, rather than licenses to each other,
> in order to circumvent Novell's earlier agreement with the community of
> GPL software developers.
>
> UWC both produces and depends on GPL licensed software, just like
> Novell, and as the custodian of our work in this area, I find the
> approach taken by Novell to be devoid of merit in relation to us as both
> customers and producers.
>
> As customers, you have failed to consider you ability as a company to
> supply us with a quality product in the face of a significant percentage
> of GPL licensed software owners moving from the GPL in its current
> version to GPL Version 3, which will leave Novell products such as Suse
> linux without access to upgrades and new versions of the software. This
> includes important software like SAMBA, on which we rely for some key
> operational functionality. Given that many other software producers are
> stating their intentions to move to GPL V3, the quality of Novell
> software will be compromised. As producers of software, you have forced
> our hand. You leave us no choice but to consider the GPL version 3 for
> our own software as well, in order to protect ourselves from
> unscrupulous companies willing to betray their customers as Novell has
> done.
>
> I cannot guarantee that I will be able to extricate UWC from Novell, but
> I can guarantee that I will try.
> All Email originating from UWC is covered by disclaimer http://www.uwc.ac.za/portal/uwc2006/content/mail_disclaimer/index.htm 
>