On 11/15/05, Curtis Rey
It seems a a double edged sword in this case. Novell opens beta program with the end result of pulling the user base closer in, and then turns around and proceeds to alienate a large swath of their user base by proclaiming that their server/enterprise products and the corporate desktop product (NLD) will no longer support the formerly ubiquitous desktop environment by announcing the GNOME over KDE decision? I don't get it!!! Would be the first time "I didn't get it", but it seems like a large portion of other people don't get it either. Hence my statement about cutting out the community.
Now this is where it gets confusing for me. When did Novell ever say that any of thier products will NOT support KDE anymore? The articles that I read only quoted a Novell person saying that SLES and NLD will focus on GNOME. I did not read anything about KDE support being dropped or even that KDE will not be included in any of the distro's. Novell and SUSE personell stated on this list that KDE will still be supported and included in all products. So, I don't see that the community is being dropped. I have also not seen any news that any of the KDE developers at SUSE have been or will be fired. I have also not seen that Mr Mantell left SUSE because of the GNOME focus decision. He just said that the company is not the same as when it started. That can mean many different things. If I have missed any articles/mails/press releases, please give me URLs so I can understand what the fuss is about. [..]
I would categorize this into an "ease of transition" move. We've all heard it said before - "people use at home what they use at work". In otherwords, If you're introduced to SuSE with GNOME at work and decide to use it at home, will this new user base have a preference for GNOME or KDE. I would wager they would stay with what they know. And in this scenario that would unmistakenly be GNOME.
Hmm.. I don't know. As far as I know, the majority of SUSE users (at home and at the office) use SUSE Linux, not NLD or SLES. Besides, NLD 9, that has been out for a wile, already had GNOME as the first selection. No default is selected, but If I were a newbie that did not know what GNOME or KDE is, I would probably take the first option, which is GNOME. So, how many GNOME-based NLD's are out there already? Nobody said a word about that. If Novell is pulling a fast one here, then you definatly have a point, but it sounds a bit too much like a conspiracy theory at this stage. I tend to see a lot of possible truth in some conspiracy theories, but this one does not have enough facts yet. If Novell start to get rid of KDE developers, then I will start to lean towards the conspiracy theory. Irony is that the article that started this whole thing was actually about rumours of Novell firing GNOME and Mono developers, not KDE. If I am wrong with any of my facts, please point me to sources where I can straighten my facts. :-) PS: Like I said before, I do understand that people are worried, but at this stage I think a lot of people are over-reacting. There just are not enough facts yet to indicate that Novell is killing off KDE or changing SUSE Linux (the distro). The company will change, that is a given. Two companies that merge cannot stay the same, they will influence each other. Let's hope that the SUSE culture will infiltrate Novell. Only SUSE and Novell personell will know how the influnces of the two cultures affect each other. The local Novell people that I have met seems to have caught on to the OSS culture, but this is not the core of Novell in the USA. There it might be a different story. -- Andre Truter | Software Engineer | Registered Linux user #185282 ICQ #40935899 | AIM: trusoftzaf | http://www.trusoft.za.org ~ A dinosaur is a salamander designed to Mil Spec ~