On 11/14/06, Anders Johansson
On Tuesday 14 November 2006 19:35, JJ Gitties wrote:
I am not trying to shut down anyone. I am also in the "wait and see" camp.
With your comments about lying to people you talk to, and general trollishness, you could have fooled me
Lets clarify something. - On this list, I am with the "wait and see" crowd. But I bitch about the MS/Novell pact. However, no one can see into the future -- so speculating what this will do to patents/GPL and Linux is pointless. But I am against the deal. Regardless of wheather its actually done anything tangible yet. - In my personal/professional life, no I am not going to "want and see" until I see that MS/Novell have done something bad before I start to not plug SUSE anymore. I stop plugging it now. Did it ever occur to you that Novell has won against Microsoft in the past?
Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, they will again? That the millions spent on open source development (yes in the west, but I detest your racist remark about Indian developers) were not just window dressing?
Novell are not going to be winning anything. They are not the force in the industry that they used to be back when they were actually fighting with Microsoft. And Microsoft corp is much bigger today than they were back then. Everyone correctly sees this deal with MS as Novell's last attempt to keep afloat. I also worked on Novell's products. And I was a SUSE user before Novell bought them. Novell have always been a company that had the better products but the shittier management. It seemed to get worse after Noorda left. Lets focus on the facts. Novell bought an established distro and a very very good distro that they added into their portfolio. It's been 3 years. What have they done with it? Is it a more powerful force in the Linux business than it was 3 years ago? Probably not. If anything, I might even seem that it went down a notch. Now that you have some other newer major players in the Linux/Open source world. In particular Ubuntu and OpenSolaris have risen up in OSS since the Novell/SUSE purchase. You have to really look close and hard at what this supposedly "experienced" corporation like Novell actually managed to achieve in 3 years with SUSE. Did they achieve market penetration? Did they get the ex-NetWare shops to migrate to SLES instead of the planned Windows 2000/2003 server? Remember, the Windows 2003 product is better than it's previous NT cousins, but it's not what I would call a more stable, better or cheaper server product by any means. And also remember, Novell didn't buy a no name brand distro. They bought one of the greatest and most well known distros at the time. It's not like they had to convince people what SUSE was. However, they did managed to come up with the great idea at first of , they should drop the SUSE name and hence unleash mass confusion. "Is Novell Linux Desktop the same that SUSE? I guess it would be SUSE pro if it was, wouldn't it? I don't get it? Which one do I buy again? Let me look at that brochure one more time..." You see stuff like that and you start to think, Novell might actually be populated by incompetent people. -- jjgitties, "*We* need to convince OpenSUSE to fork, or let 'em die. To bad, it is a wonderful Distro. But their parent company is NOT our friend."