On 2011-07-25 Kim wrote:
Am 25.07.2011 21:45, schrieb Sebastian Oliva:
I am worried though about the contrary, the effects of this on the rest of the FOSS community. At least in my region, we got some flak from the previous deals, and I feel this one will not be an exception.
yeah, this is one of the main problem. From the corporate point of view it´s kinda great to have such deal, but the community point of view is much much worse.
Well a few tin-foil-hats still complain but let's be real. This deal is an extension (the second) of a deal which was started 5 years ago. Everyone screamed blood and murder and has the sky fallen due to this deal? No, it has not. Nothing bad happened*. So I say - business as usual, boring, nothing to see here. It's a corporate thing, let SUSE do their thing...
I sometimes post to an Linux-forum and sometimes talk about the patent-deal. That the other members call me and SUSE "idiots and traitors on open source and the FLOSS-community" is normal.
See * - they are hypocrites or just don't know what they talk about.
I´m really disappointed about that :-(
*sure things did happen... Those complainy people DO enjoy the benefits of the SUSE-Microsoft deal every time their Libre/OpenOffice reads a doc or docx file, every time they hang their laptop in a windows network, run linux on HyperV or Windows in a VM under linux etc etc. Even if they use Fedora or Ubuntu or another distro. Because none of this code is a fork of anything else; none of this code is under a CLA; and all this code is actively contributed back to Free Software projects. Through SUSE, it seems to me, MS is a better FOSS citizen than some large linux distributions themselves... Not to say I believe MS does this out of their good heart. It's a business which needs to make money. And because of that sometimes does stupid and evil stuff. Just like Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE. You shouldn't believe the PR - a company has no morals. People do. We just have the luck to have companies who make money on doing the right thing, like SUSE and Red Hat.