Onsdag 08 november 2006 08:49 skrev richard (MQ):
I think a lot of the posts on this thread rather miss the point - once big business gets involved in an organisation, the *only* thing that's really important to them is the bottom line. Community spirit and F/OSS values count for nothing to the accountants.
Of course. But it is possible that the FLOSS community and big enterprise can have common interests. Certainly my continued support of Novell (translation, beta testing, promotion, user support), is dependent on Novell's actions not contradicting my interests and the interests of the Linux community at large. And I assume this applies for many others.
My very real fear is that now, unless the OpenSuSE community can put clear water between it and Novell, the developers, testers and other supporters will find other distributions to work with and OpenSuSE will wither. Retaining this support - and mine too, FWIW - is crucial. Statements from Andreas may not be enough, however well thought through.
I don't think it's possible to put clear water between Novell/SLE and openSUSE, and thus it should not even be attempted. The only way I could see it, was a complete fork. The way to go must be to inform people and let the truth be known - hopefully the truth isn't unacceptable. I must say with the last FAQ, with the community questions most of my worries are laid to rest. The only things that now still leaves a little bad taste are the following, pretty intangible issues. 1) Novell to a certain degree working around the GPL. With the new information it's not as bad as I had feared, I think comparison with TiVoization is going to far. 2) I don't like that Novell try to take advantage of customers being scared of patent litigation. The way I understand things now, Novell are indeed paying an innovation tax to MS, and at the same time saying: "we don't infringe patents now, and we won't do it in the future either." Either they're lying/wrong about infringing patents, or they're paying a truck load of money to give customers a psychological sense of security that they pretty much had before. Either case I'm not happy. 3) Novell has given MS ammunition to FUD about interoperability and Office "Open" XML. These are things I can live with however, albeit I'm not pleased. Of course I have very little insight into the benefits this deal brings in enterprise environments. I sure hope they make up for it. Martin --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org