Adrian Schröter wrote:
Am Tuesday 07 November 2006 12:38 schrieb noniko:
Recently I have read about many post about Novell-MS collaboration in opensuse@opensuse.org ML (Though it is an ML for general support....).
I'd like to how openSUSE should think about this topic. I don't think it a weird question, because the "Microsoft/Novell Collaboration" news is at the top page of opensuse.org site.
maybe it is bit too prominent there ...
For example:
1.It is a very important news to openSUSE, so the users should keep watching on this topic. 2.It is just a matter of Novell and has nothing or very little to do with openSUSE. 3.openSUSE only report the news and do not think it should make any comments. 4.Now discussing. Later there'll be some announcement from openSUSE.
Either of the 4 would be all right for me. I just like to know.
I am not sure what to write here, almost everything is said in the announcements, but of course there will be questions. So better raise questions now and we (as a SUSE/Novell employee acting as an interface to Novell) need to find answers to them.
The announcements raise more questions than anything else. There has been a lot of FUD (e.g. by a Fedora maintainer who works for Red Hat, or trolls like Bruce Perens), but there have been some *potentially*/hypothetically valid points as well. I think it's important to put forward that the openSUSE.org community and the openSUSE distribution is FOSS, it's driven by employees of Novell but also by contributions from people of the community who do that in their spare time, for free, and that we're not any less "holy" (FSF-speak) or "worthy" (OSS-speak) than any other FOSS project. When stuff like "Fedora will never compromise" or "boycott SUSE" is written in the blogosphere and published/referenced everywhere, we should really have a FAQ/position of the openSUSE community to hold against it. Future shall tell whether Novell has cut its throat or will become a real contender to Redhat through the MS deal, but we shouldn't let rumors, false assumptions and other potential damage in the FOSS community insult or discredit the SUSE Linux distribution nor the work of the openSUSE.org community. We don't deserve less respect nor credit than Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. (IMO it should also be mentioned again how many projects Novell is sponsoring through full-time or part-time developers on their payroll - be it OpenOffice.org, KDE, GNOME, Mono, Linux kernel, ... ...)
We may need to create an FAQ out of them ...
Yes, a FAQ would be great too. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> _\_v http://www.fosdem.org http://opensuse.org