Hi Mark, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@ubuntu.com> writes:
[...] If you have an interest in being part of a vibrant community that cares about keeping free software widely available and protecting the rights of people to get it free of charge, free to modify, free of murky encumbrances and “undisclosed balance sheet liabilities”, then please do join us.
We do share these goals as well.
I know that posting this message to an OpenSUSE list will be controversial. I'm greatly respectful of the long tradition of excellence in the SuSE product and community and have no desire to undermine that with this post. That said, I think the position taken by Novell leadership in their contract with Microsoft is hugely disrespectful of the contributions of thousands of GPL programmers and contributors to SuSE, and I know that many are looking for a new place to get involved that is not subject to the same arbitrary executive intervention. Ubuntu is one option, as are Gentoo, Debian and other communities. Please accept this mail in that spirit.
There's been a lot of confusion and misrepresentation - and maybe not the best reaction from Novell to all the concerns and fears that the contract raised - but I do see us on the same side: as part of the open source community. Mark, I'd like to invite you to discuss what possibilities we have to work together against the domination of Microsoft on the desktops - instead of fighting against each other. I would prefer to see more users switching from Windows to Linux than just Linux users switching distributions. Regards, Andreas Project Lead openSUSE distribution -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126