Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Ben Rosenberg <red.kryptonite@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/10/05, Kevin Donnelly <kevin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thursday 10 November 2005 05:38, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
> > I don't believe Novell execs
> > quite understand what "free" in free software means.
>
> It's very sad that Dr Mantel has gone, and I also salute him for his work
> on
> SuSE down the years. However, the above sentence is not entirely fair -
> after all, Novell has opensourced all of SUSE for the first time, and
> started
> opensuse (it could be argued that this should have been done about 3 years
> ago, and Novell didn't own the company then).


SUSE has always been open source.. even yast was open source. One always got
the source for yast. What one couldn't do was take the source and modify it,
then release it as one's own product. That was the restriction. It wasn't
GPL'ed or licensed under the BSD license. I think what you mean is that
Novell has started to give away .iso images instead of just giving the FTP
install option. Those of old timers remember when SUSE use to make .iso
images for download. They only stopped this practice around 7.2 which was in
Y2k. So it was only a 4 year period where they didn't offer .iso images.
They've ALWAYS been open source. I mean my God.. Hubert started SUSE 1 year
after Linus released his code.. they've been at this a long time and have
always been above board as far as being open source.

I'm not digging on you.. just giving you and others the correct information.

-Ben


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Atheism is a non-prophet organization.