Am Tuesday 07 November 2006 16:36 schrieb Martin Schlander:
Tirsdag 07 november 2006 16:17 skrev Pascal Bleser:
Yes, a FAQ would be great too.
I agree a lot with Pascal, it's impossible to predict the consequences of the agreement in general, but it's very clear that openSUSE is suffering a lot.
is it ? can't it be also the case that openSUSE and the general open source world gets also lots of new chances ? Some chances, I do see right now: Linux will run easily under Windows. What does that mean ? Way more people will be able to try & use Linux and its applications. People who would never risk their Windows installation for just testing Linux. Imagine the hughe amount of Windows users. They all are now potential Linux users :) Document exchange may become finally work for sure, because MS will join OOo development.
I sent the following questions to Novell Open Audio for their upcoming show on the subject, maybe some of these could be rephrased for an FAQ, and maybe they could also serve as inspiration for AJ's blog regarding which subjects to cover.
I can't answer them all right now, but I would like to comment some at least.
1) What is Novell's answer to the allegations of GPL violations with regards to: a) offering special patent protection for it's customers that does not apply to other users of the same code, including openSUSE users. And b) paying a royalty to a third party for distributing free software.
please see my comment to Pascals mail on opensuse. Short version: this will definitive not happen thanks to the GPL license ;)
2) It's announced that MS will receive part of Novell's revenue. Is this a fixed sum per SLED subscription sold? or how will this be calculated?
sorry, I do not know the details, but these will usually not get published by companies who do an agreement. ...
5) A lot of headlines say "MS to interoperate with open source". Isn't it the case that MS will only cooperate on interoperability with Novell's proprietary products?
well, thanks to the GPL you can only do changes, which are also usable by others ;) So there is no way to add a functionality in a GPL software which is not usable from someone else. There could be of course a commercial product on top of it in some SUSE Linux Enterprise product, but this is not a topic for openSUSE.org, I think.
6) Novell have talked a lot about open sourcing more of it's proprietary technologies in the recent years, which has endeed happened on some occasions, will this deal affect the plans to open up more technologies in the future?
Well, this is always decided for every single task. I do not think that anyone from Novell said that all Novell products will be open source. But we do have openSUSE.org for this reason. It is clear that openSUSE.org is an open source project.
7) Are Novell surprised by the very 'mixed' reception that the deal has gotten from the community with users leaving and some even talking about a boycott?
I just can tell from my personal view. I am not surprised that there are strong concerns, but I am also very happy that a large amount of people want to figure out what this really means. And that it is not limited to "a way" view. In the end, as far as I can see it atm, there are only new possibilities and no new limitations. The world becomes better by this step :) And seriously, people who expect now the sudden death of Novell or open source do definitive not understand the power of open source.
8) Isn't this whole thing Microsoft succeeding with the oldest trick in the book - "divide and conqour"?
Might be. But divide something from the 90% what they conqueror to us is a nice step for us. ..
10) The patent issue seems to play a large role in this whole thing. Which surprises me a bit, since I thought Novell were focusing on the developing markets that don't seem to be as polluted by out of control software patents as the US apparently is. I hope Novell are working on a better long term solution to the problem than paying revenue to competitors. Money which will of course be reinvested in putting Novell out of business.
These are new, I didn't send them to NOA, thought of 'em later.
The problem is that issues with patents do already affect our software. And we need to deal with them. But these problems did also exist before and need really to spend here quite some effort to find such software and remove it (because it is very often anyway a GPL violation).
11) Is it possible that we will see technology that is known to be covered by a MS patent, implemented in openSUSE under an OSS license in the future?
This is something which we need to clarify in our policies, which are getting prepared for public review. My personal feeling would say that this could be theoretical possible, but it would be definitive happen in a way that this makes it visible. For example providing an extra (and optional!) package via the openSUSE Add-On CDs, like we do with the other binary only stuff.
12) Is there any (small) area where the deal helps the Linux community at large, and not Novell/SUSE Linux _only_.
As written above, work on samba, OpenOffice and mono should be helpfull for everyone who does use these. bye adrian -- Adrian Schroeter SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany email: adrian@suse.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org