Hi all, Pascal Bleser a �crit :

Hans-Peter Holler wrote:

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Hi, as a former SuSE employee just these few thoughts: - Knowledge Q: who has the benefit: Novell or users and developers ? A: users and developers: no, Novell: yes, grab it and put it into the waste basket

I do think it's both.

It's only because of Novell that we now have openSUSE and SUSE Linux OSS, because it can be "given away" to the community for free. That wasn't possible for SUSE GmbH because

So do I, they made a large amount

of their cash flow with the boxed SUSE versions.

Right,

Having a big company in the back has advantages and drawbacks, as always. The SUSE team is less independent, and quite some directions are dictated by

the default desktop, obviously because they have a large GNOME workforce in

Novell (e.g. GNOME as the ex-Ximian team). Be aware of the "competition" between USA and EU, between Gtk/Gnome and QT/Troll-Tech ... which could be a very good thing for everybody as it stimulate both side for everybody's benefits; Why "Could", not "Is" : from MY (simplistic) Point Of View, EU is fighting to defend his own part of the business, USA is fighting to rule the whole thing anyhow, at any price! Just look at the Software patent thing in EU Parliement and you'll know what I mean!

But I also believe that the Linux community as a whole has benefits from having another big player into the Linux business.

Among drawbacks, from an Europeen End User Point Of View, you can think about not beeing able to listen to mp3 streams out of the box with std oss apps that used to work fine with previous releases ... that's what they call improvement ;-)

Amongst others, having SLES certified for products like Oracle, DB2, BEA Weblogic and similar enterprise software (albeit not OSS) is much easier when you're a business called Novell than a small german company called SuSE GmbH.

I don't agree : SuSE Gmbh, little Europeen company, start to work with IBM to be the one who is running on S/390 Mainframe (around year 2001, at least we, tiny SuSE Linux IT startup, got some timeframe to "play" with an S/390 at french IBM site in 2001), and got certified EAL2+ (07/2003). BTW, maybe it's one (more) reason for Novell's interest in SuSE ...

Up to now, it's more or less a win-win situation. Of course, it's sad to see people leave the SUSE team. But nevertheless, there are advantages with SUSE being part of Novell.

The only one I see is OpenSuSE creation, and YaST beeing GPLed ...

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- Business Q: does it make sense to support a competitor ?

You mean Redhat ? :)

This is really biased... I mean... are you really pretending Novell is jumping on the Linux wagon, porting their products to Linux, offering migration plans from Netware to Novell, investing that much... just to kill off SuSE Linux as a competitor ?

Maybe not killing, just taking as hostages their customers/users ... think about the City of Munich from a geopolitics P.O.V. (see the link at http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse/2005-Nov/0307.html )

If that was the idea behind it, they would have let it die right from the start. I don't see any reason not to believe Novell's strategy is Linux.

I've experienced beeing baught by a bigger company and I felt exactly like Hans-Peter ...

Anyhow, I personally don't care that much about Novell itself. I do care about the SUSE staff, the SUSE Linux distribution and the openSUSE community. Obviously, those are all dependent on Novell, but Novell needs the community to make their business succeed. It seems pretty clear to me that Novell has understood that, and you must be blind or on crack to not have noticed it's their current strategy (amongst others).

Yes, how to control a phenomenon that could help people gain freedom from Capitalism Rules and shareholders!

SUSE is opening up. Fine with me. Of course, I hope there won't be more layoffs and that the SUSE team can keep up with their high standards of quality. But I also think they should open up and involve the community a lot more. It has been started, with more to come. Mostly thanks to Novell.

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A: no, buy him, say you will integrate, establish an integration team, and put team's results together with the team itself into the waste basket A: yes, but make the product 'open', let it fail, then say 'this happened only because dumb developers outside the company had changed the code'. Then put the product and all people envolved into the waste basket.

I wonder where you see that happen. This sounds pretty biased and... ridiculous, almost.

Try it Once, then you'll know ;-)

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- Ethics Q: do company leaders must have social compentence ?

Heh. We would know that ;) Company leaders are there to make the shareholders happy. Welcome to capitalism.

Hope one day I can say : "Goodbye Capitalism, I won't miss you" :-)

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A: indeed no, a department because of resignation or synergy effects is only reduction of TCO and therefore increases share holder value. Should one answer 'yes', put him into the waste basket

And what's your point ? If you have been laid off by Novell, it's definately a sad thing for you, and a pity Novell had to do so. Good luck for your next job, wishing you all the best, but... your argumentation is pretty childish... to me you just sound pissed off.

Maybe Mr Mantel and other former SuSE employee will bring us a FreeSuSE Project ;-) Anyway, thank you for your contribution to this wonderfull experience! MaNU --