Yes, you need to switch to KUbuntu immediately. Because of a corporate agreement between Novell and Microsoft that nobody knows what it is about and that does most likely neither affect you nor the openSUSE project at all.
You're hiding your head in the sand if you actually believe this. The implications of Novell's actions today are *crystal* clear to the rest of the open source world. Novell is now trying to claim that *their* version of Linux is free of patent risks, and that everyone else's Linux isn't. Section 7 of the GPL was written *precisely* to prevent this tactic. Here's the real meat of the problem: If Novell ever distributes code to any project under the GPL, and that code infringes a M$ patent, and M$ tries to assert patent rights on anyone in that patent, Novell immediately loses the right to distribute that code under the GPL, per section 7. Eben Moglen, counsel for the Free Software Foundation, has already said as much. You signed a patent agreement with M$ for speculative protection. And you'd better believe that the greater open source community will hold you accountable for your choice. Novell developers will find it *incredibly* difficult to work upstream now. You can't have it both ways. Either you believe in open source, or you don't. And by trying to use "patent protection" as a competitive advantage, Novell has made it clear which side of the fence they stand on. The sad irony: I don't believe that SuSE would ever have made this deal as an independent company. I've watched opensuse with interest since its inception. I always kind of figured that, as opensuse matured, the opensuse and Fedora communities might have had opportunities to work together directly. I guess that won't happen now. Too bad. --g On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Pascal Bleser wrote:
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Andreas Hanke wrote:
Michal Hlavac schrieb:
When I leave M$ (3 years ago) and choose Suse, I felt free... Now I am confusing.... I am deciding to leave suse and choose something like kubuntu... I like to feel free...
And you just got to switch to [KX]?Ubuntu, which Shuttleworth will sell to Sun, which already has a deal with MS *g* ;)
cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\
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