On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 18:16 +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
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
You can try and dress it up all you want, but you're an intelligent person and you knew exactly what you were doing when you sent this and I doubt the motive was not pure.
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.
Are you seriously saying you have no arbitrary executive power over
ubuntu? You could seriously damage the project at least in the near
term by withdrawing your monetary support.
What about disrespect on your side:
1) Having a stated policy of not funding any significant new software
development because the Return on Investment is not good enough
2) Preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer from updating GNOME packages
until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped because you had hired him.
3) Not releasing any source code for launchpad/rosetta/malone to
maintain a competitive advantage
4) Planning to rely on the community to support your for profit ventures
(you can say you aren't but since the entire canonical staff last I
heard is less than the size of the just the kernel teams of either
Novell/SuSE or RedHat... )
5) Trying to simultaneously supplant Debian's community with "Ubuntu"
while relying heavily on the Debian community to be successful.
You come in to denigrate and to divide this here based on the actions of
Novell as a company, yet you rely on projects that have major
contributions from Novell employees (for that matter from Sun which has
a deal with Microsoft, IBM, etc):
1) the kernel
2) glibc, gcc
3) X
4) GNOME and KDE
6) Xgl/compiz/beryl
7) beagle/f-spot/banshee
8) etc, etc, etc
Its your right to disagree with the MS/Novell agreement, but this tactic
is extremely underhanded because its not in the spirit of community and
cooperation at all.
-JP
--
JP Rosevear