Re: [opensuse-project] Invitation to OpenSUSE developers

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

Mark Shuttleworth writes:

...

If you have an interest in being part of a vibrant community that cares about keeping free software widely available and protecting the rights of people to get it free of charge, free to modify, free of murky encumbrances and “undisclosed balance sheet liabilities”, then please do join us.

We do share these goals as well.

I think most NON-MS people do. I like to include all the BSD variants that have these same goals. I think the greatest problem is the in-fighting with in Linux. Some are a bit too far from understanding that user's just want the thing to work and work well. What I see as the major reason most people I work with use MS is that their application only runs on MS. We really need to get more of the great commercial applications working on Linux or a free solution. But most people still have to some how provide for themsevles and their families. We do not have all the time to code all these great applications, and still live. That is why there are commercial companies that support linux. We need them. We need to provide for the great applications or get the ones that work on MS to work on linux. I know that most of my customer use the OS that provides their needs. What ever that may be.

...

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.

There's been a lot of confusion and misrepresentation - and maybe not the best reaction from Novell to all the concerns and fears that the contract raised - but I do see us on the same side: as part of the open source community.

Mark, I'd like to invite you to discuss what possibilities we have to work together against the domination of Microsoft on the desktops - instead of fighting against each other.

I would prefer to see more users switching from Windows to Linux than just Linux users switching distributions.

I would love to see more work for this than all the in fighting we have now. We really need to get our ducks together to provide what user's need. Then they can move from MS to a better solution. -- Boyd Gerber ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org