Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4417 mails)

[James Ogley <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks, let's hold off the RIP SUSE and "let's find a new distro" posts,
and look at this through mature eyes for a moment shall we?

The acquisition by Novell of SUSE, should it go through potentially
represents a massive investment into Linux/Free Software development,
Novell are paying $210m in cash for SUSE - they're not short of a few
bob.  At the same time, IBM (remember them?) are investing some $50m in
Novell.

Here we have a GNOME-focused (Novell own Ximian) company buying a
KDE-focused company.  The potential here is that for the first time
we'll have a commercial Linux distribution where the two major desktop
environments in the Free Software world are equal partners,
complimenting each other in the distribution, rather than one being
pushed at the expense of the other.

Here's a great quote from the Press Release:

"Novell is firmly committed to open standards and maintaining the
existing open source kernel development efforts. From advocacy and
development resources to events and support of open source efforts like
kernel projects, XFree86, ReiserFS, KDE, GNOME and Mono, Novell stands
side-by-side with the open source community."

There's a certain other three-letter company who are trying to kill the
open source kernel development efforts, Novell potentially provide
muscle to fight SCO alongside IBM.

Let's not go nuts guys, remember, sometimes good things do happen to
good companies :)
-- 
James Ogley, Webmaster, Rubber Turnip james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk Jabber: riggwelter@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Using Free Software since 1994, running GNU/Linux (SuSE 9.0)
GNOME updates for SuSE: http://www.usr-local-bin.org