Mark, welcome on this list, Am Friday 24 November 2006 19:16 schrieb Mark Shuttleworth: ...
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 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.
I do accept that your disagreement with the contract, but I would like to ask you not to create the impression that SUSE or openSUSE.org is acting against GPL programmers. There is no practical change for GPL programmers by this contract (only for commercial Novell customers there is a change), anything else is FUD spread between open source communities. FUD is something what an open source project should keep away, since quite a lot of the developers from Canonical and SUSE do work together in various GPL based open source projects and we should avoid any bad blood to keep the good atmosphere there. FUD does divide us and do not make us stronger together. good evening adrian PS: seriously, I promise you that your baby (Ubuntu) is known enough, so everybody who want to switch will find it :) There is no reason for risking exact the situation some certain large commercial software company would like to have. Lets show them that in any doubt the open modell of open source communities, even when they may be competitive, remains to be stronger. -- Adrian Schroeter openSUSE.org project manager SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany email: adrian@suse.de -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org