Tue, 14 Nov 2006, by houghi@houghi.org:
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 11:28:22PM +0100, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:
You can try to be as positive as you like about this "deal" houghi, but in the end you know just as well as the rest that MS is not in it to make nice with OSS "community" or anyone supporting OSS for that matter, they're it it to find some way to make themselfs come out on top.
I am not positive, nor negative. I am realistic and say that we need to wait. In the end Novell wants to make money with the deal as well. SUSE used to be a company that was in it for the money as well. The fact that Microsft wants to make money as well is only very normal to me.
I'm not blaming MS anything, of course they do what they always do, no surprise there.
So what do you expect? That Microsoft suddenly decides to stop their business, had over all the code to GPL and give the money they have to the IFF?
No, I expect from Novell that they represent "us" as GNU/Linux and OSS users to the best of their abilities, because I was expecting that the SUSE board of directors would have asked that from Novell when SUSE AG was sold. Now MS "gave" Novell a whole lot of money, and nobody seems to know exactly what for. This make me *very* nervous about the /Novell/ motives.
I am absolutely uninterested in what Miscrosoft is doing, because there is nothing that has changed. So what if they have deal with Novell? I have heard no alternatives as to what should have been done. Not signing I asume would be how most people would have liked it and I am curious why. Probably because Microsoft is 'the enemy'.
The "deal" itself is empty as far as I can see from the link below, the OSS community as a whole doesn't gain anything from it, and neither do SUSE users. The only ones that gain are the Novell bank-acount and lawyers from MS.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/11/microsoft_patent_kuhn_warning/
All that is saying is that they *STILL* can sue over patents, so from that point of vieuw nothing has changed. It was not that suddenly they are able to do so. It is not that they could not try to slip some code into OSS before.
The bit that said nobody is really protected from patent suets anyway was clevery hit in the agreement don't you think? But they do have leveraged over other Linx distro's, now they've hooked one player. Divide and conquer, maybe you've heard of it.
I for one am not going to spend more money on Novell either, until I am very convinced that this really *is* a good deal for OSS and "freedom as in speech".
Either? I have not spend any money on them ever. The latest I spend money was SuSE 9.1 and I am angry with myself for buying so many versions. Now I just download the stuff
Well, I have have at least 6 boxes here, and every penny spent on SUSE has been well worth it; *sofar*.
I will not look wether this is a good deal for OSS, what I am interested is that it is not a bad one and nothing is pointing in that direction, exept FUD coming from the OSS and Linux front itself. And to me that points to Anti-Microsoft attitude, instead of Pro-Linux or Pro-OSS.
I remain sceptical, until proven otherwise. That has nothing to do with being anti-Microsoft, only with seeing that MS has no interest in making Linux better, so they're after something else. I just don't know what yet. Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 26N , 4 29 47E. + ICQ: 277217131 SUSE 9.2 + Jabber: muadib@jabber.xs4all.nl Kernel 2.6.8 + See headers for PGP/GPG info. Claimer: any email I receive will become my property. Disclaimers do not apply. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org