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A 5-Year Deal With Microsoft To Dump Novell/SUSE
Nicholas Petreley writes, "Wake up little SUSE, wake up. No, that's not good enough. Wake up SUSE customers, wake up. Novell is jeopardizing the future of Linux for its own short-term rewards. If you want to see Linux flourish, let alone survive, after Novell's five year deal with Microsoft expires, I suggest we make an alternative five-year deal with Microsoft. In this case, our part of the deal is to spend the next five minutes, months, or years migrating away from every shred of Novell/SUSE software in our home, office, or enterprise."
My work here is dung.
I understand people hate Microsoft. But, how is this any different than the mono project and their microsoft deal?
Microsoft advertises on slashdot as well.
Microsoft is, in the end, just a company. It may be a monopoly, but it is just a company. It's not going to destroy linux if one company makes a deal with another one. Linux is an operating system that spans MANY companies. If anything, this may get linux into more of those pro-windows IT shops. The ones that aren't pro-windows won't care about the deal either way.
It just seems odd to me that people are foaming at the mouth over this.
People who have actually seen the agreements: 10.
/., digg, or anywhere else? 0.
/. paranoia gets to me. While there may be downsides to the agreement the fact of the matter is that Suse customers will benefit as long as it exists and probably after it is no longer. Linux users at the very least won't be hurt because nothing Novell or Microsoft does will break Linux....neither company owns it, one of them actively contributes, and the other is saying it will help with interoperability.
People who have seen the comments who have publicly shared the exact details on
Honestly sometimes the
Sheesh....time for a break from my tinfoil hat and staying indoors.
2^24 comments should be enough for anybody
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I'm doing my part already. I installed the RC2 on my test pc and will be installing the final version on all compatible machines.
Great!, even now as i speak im trowing my SuSe Disks in the microwave, and burning the man pages now
Going to bring up a problem that LiquidCoooled brought up in another thread, hopefully it's visible here.
Looks like replies are broken, perhaps data-base limitation, see LiquidCooled's post here
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
The thesis here is a little murky, but the author has enough of a point for me to wipe Novell-related Linux products (though that's easy for me to say, as I don't actually use any that I know of).
In brief: Microsoft has cross-licensed software patents with Novell. The idea is to legitimize their patents before they attempt to sue other Linux distro vendors (and probably others).
The author is correct in their assertion that, if Novell has done so (and it appears that they may have), they are actually now in violation of the GPL. From section 7:
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
The endgame is where I lose the guy a little on the specifics, but it doesn't really matter. The point here is another anti-Linux legal FUD campaign. suffice it to say, this is hardly a conspiracy theory. Microsoft is the direct author of SCO.
Say it with me, kids. Software Patents are Insane.
Software Patents are Insane.
No one can read 200,000 of them, or the few thousand new ones each day. No human being can validate code against the patent base. All software is a ticking patent timebomb. It is (vaguely) legalized barratry, and the rest of the world (who has soundly avoided this insanity) will be laughing at the American software industry all the way to the bank.
There is no solution short of immediate and complete invalidation of all current and future patents on software.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
I assumed you meant "less than 1%" in which case it should have been " Which means you'd better stay away from Linux anyway because you'll be absolutely rubbish at redirecting STDIN, STDOUT and STEDERR at the command line...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Perhaps there's a third option: SUSE will contain code covered under Microsoft patents, since Microsoft is helping both the distribution and Windows interoperate better, which might mean breaking a few of its own patents, since Microsoft has that right.
How about a fourth? The article thinks Novell is spreading FUD. Maybe out of this deal is code for use in other linux distros, but Microsoft is helping to energize SUSE given how much money was dumped into Novell.
Now for a fifth: the article referenced in this post is just spreading FUD. It's the typical, "It stinks of Microsoft so it must be bad." I don't see how better interop is bad.
It is kinda scary what they're doing. Everyone knows that Microsoft WILL do something evil. They already are by saying that only SuSE customers are safe. But they have a rug they're just waiting to pull out from under Novell. Novell is making a deal with the devil, and they're going to pay for it.
I'm no longer in love with your scaly green skin since you started going out with that snake-in-the-grass, Micro$$$$$$oft.
I'm dating a nice lady from Africa named Ubuntu. And she has all the features I need!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Listen.
Do you want in the door at Fortune 500 companies? I mean lots of them? Then this is a good thing.
If Linux is to displace Microsoft then it needs exposure exposure exposure. It needs people seeing if they can run complex Excel spreadsheets with VB Macros on other platforms. It needs people seeing if there are alternate Exchange backends that allow full Outlook frontends.
If Linux works well with Microsoft more people will at least *try* Linux, plain and simple. When people try it, they either stay with it or come back and say why it won't work.
For example, there are tons of popular PC platforms that various Linux distros won't work on without changing things. Just 2 weeks ago I attempted to install the newest Ubuntu build on a 3 year old P4 IBM business class PC and you know what, it wouldn't install. I was able to troubleshoot it to a lack of onboard video memory, but a quick bios fix took care of that. Unfortunately the error that came up was so vague that the "average" user would have probably given up.
Linux needs all the "new" users it can get. They are the ones that find the funky errors, the ones that the "elites" otherwise consider a "minor" issue.
One of the reasons that Windows is so popular is that for the most part it installs without any problems, especially on PC's from major manufacturers (which Fortune 500 companies tend to buy).
Enough now, I'm at work.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
Is it really that bad that Microsoft and Novell made this deal?
Yes.
Microsoft is the author of SCO.
They are continuing to do anything and everything they can to sabotage Linux specifically and open-source in general, not out of any particular malice, but just because it's business, and that's how they interpret their duty to their shareholders.
There are very few reasons why it would be worth it to Microsoft to make such a big payout to Novell to "cross-license" ludicrous "software patents" with them. A rather transparent continuation of the quasi-legal FUD campaign against Linux is the only really credible one.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Their engineering has improved since the 90's, but it's part of their corporate culture to compete by means other than quality and price.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Hands up, who could see this coming? I would have _never_ believed Novell would do something like this. Microsoft trying to destroy Suse, Oracle trying to destroy RedHat. This two distributions are one of the most respected Linux distributions among corporate customers. Enemies have found clever ways to hurt Linux, but they can never kill it.
quite some time ago ...
i used suse quite some time, but the gentoo package system and the debian package systems both are just another new dimension compared to rpm
I've been a long time SuSE supporter and always pushed that it was great for an end user and great for any number of server configurations. Whatever the deals outcome may be I'm definetly not going to stop using it (personally) for fear of microsoft. I've long thought that SuSE may be one that could give end users a good incentive to switch away from microsoft, when Novell bought them I was even more excited (never been a big novell fann though). I'm not going to start running until I see them coming over the top of the hill at me.... and even then I plan to throw a couple rocks first ...
*DrugCheese rants*
At any rate, I'll make some statements to start a conversation and if the rest of Slashdot agrees with them, do not respond or refute them:
- Microsoft is the awesomenest company ever--assimilating Novell's SUSE is just another sign that we need to worship MS.
- Vote Republican or you kill babies.
- Linux is a deformed version of something I threw up last night after too much whiskey.
Once again, remember that silence is complacency, I await your responses if you disagree with me!My work here is dung.
Wow, what a difference a few years makes. The comparisons you use are strange. I take it you never used windows before NT or 95. What you are _REALLY_saying is that windows has been around so long, the windows way of doing things is what users expect... No, I'm not going to tell you that is a lame way of looking at things, but you seem to think that most users _KNOW_ how things are supposed to be and how they are supposed to work. I deal with users every day that don't know how to do even the simplest tasks in windows, and are amazed when someone knows such things off the top of their head. My point is that your comparison is falacious in that it makes an assumption about what _regular users_ know and want.
What I find is that they want a magic disc that they can put in the slot in the front of their "hard drive unit" and magically everything either works, or fixes itself. They are just as confused about having to run setup from a CD as they are about running an install script. Either one is a kind of "black magic" to them as they don't understand either. Many of them don't know if they have installed software or not, despite having run the installation CD.
The hunt for drivers or updates is something that all computer users used to have to do. The Linux desktop, while not exactly a shining example of easy to use/install software, is still a viable alternative, and if _regular people_ have to learn one OS or another, there is no reason not to learn Linux. Remember, _regular people_ are baffled by every OS, not just Linux. Your ranting is counter productive, and seems to settle on windows simply because its been here for a few years, and until every other OS looks and works like windows, then windows is the only OS to use. This is not sound logical reasoning.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
First off i like Suse over Debian as cd wise there are less patch bandwidth issues (over quota come back next month) that you get with apt-get, otherwise you have compile it from scratch.
The way we use suse means theres still plenty of config file editing in vi. So don't just think gui config tools
Yes I agree novell will 'die in 5 years' becuase of ms deal. - I guess Umbunto will be the new linux desktop os, but for the servers ? fedora ? / fds ?, Were not willing to go 'enterprise' linux.
Suggestions
"Microsoft is attempting ... eradicate Linux, sabotage it..."
So the best option is react with:
"Novell/SUSE users and customers should wipe Novell/SUSE off their disks and install virtually any non-Novell/SUSE alternative in its place."
Also:
"I seem to recall Microsoft made five year (or similar length) deals with Sybase, Symantec, Corel, Borland, Citrix, and other companies that thrived before the deals only to be reduced to insignificant gnats afterward."
It's the same plan that they used to kill Apple. Oh, wait...
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Would the question
"Novell's November 2 press release states that, "Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products." Are these payments for a patent license to Novell?"
Really be a question a lot of people made?
Then why is the question:
"Is this a trap?"
Not in there?
THe point is: the term "FAQ" is used too loosely these days. I bet there are better engrish words for this reports.
I have never used SuSE anyway. I have installed it a couple of time, and I found it bloated and needlessly complicated.
Some companies may buy SuSE, because of the Microsoft deal, but I strongly doubt it. SCO has shown that legal threats do not work. Do you really think IBM will beg for mercy if Novell (or Microsoft) knocks on the door, legal papers in hand? Do you think HP will do the same? What about Sun? I don't think so.
As a matter of fact, the Novell/Microsoft deal may be excellent for the future of Linux: I can see a lot of companies (HP, IBM, Red Hat, Mandriva, Sun, etc) get together and pool legal resources to fight any such threat. And that means -- worst case scenario -- that their combined economic power will simply crush any attempt by Microsoft to be "legally" naughty. The fact is, Linux cannot be stopped right now: there is simply too much interest and too much money at stake for too many people. And I suspect Microsoft knows this: it's simply trying to dip a toe in the water, see how this Linux thing really is working, try to work out some sort of compromise and preserve its profit margin. But it knows it can't fight Linux anymore (or, at least, some parts of Microsoft know that -- some other parts may ignore it).
Open source is an idea whose time has come. And it was Victor Hugo who said: "You can't fight an idea whose time has come". Again, I suspect Microsoft knows this. Hence the Novell deal.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
you ever notice how similar evolution is to outlook? I always thought it was odd to name a program evolution that did more to mimic another application than actually improve anything. I'm not sure I want to stop using it though... it is pretty handy to have all of that stuff bundled together in one app. I bet thats why microsoft has a patent somewhere that says they own the idea.
Chaos is Divine *
Novell is jeopardizing the future of Linux for its own short-term rewards.
What, companies thinking in a shortsighted way??!? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked! This is unheard of, ab-so-lu-te-lay unheard of.
How about not making this a flamebait thread. I'm a system administrator who won't touch linux because of the lack of simple end-user functionality for my business.
Until Nix can come up with something that Frieda the idiot receptionist can use, it's worthless outside of a server room.
'Cuz the Admins already know about the problem and are working on it. Blasting them in every thread/story/post doesn't make them work faster, you know.
Linux is user-friendly, but it is not idiot-friendly.
Windows is idiot-friendly.
Andy Zebrowitz is a faggot
Dont you guys get it?
This 5 year deal with novel is nothing more than a smoke screen.. they are counting on our hatred of Microsoft to blind us and have the same exact reaction you're having right now... a call to boycott Novell... then Microsoft wins... don't you understand? Novell dies... as does SUSE along with them, and there is one less distro for MS to deal with... and for a 5 year thing to burry a company $350 mil is not a bad deal... Trust me, they would get what they wanted for cheap.
So I'm going to throw out SUSE today in light of this article. Companies who put their effort into FOSS aren't supposed to be making money anyways, right guys? I'd rather make a deal with the devil than give way to Red Hat and Oracle without a fight.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Novell/SUSE users and customers should wipe Novell/SUSE off their disks and install virtually any non-Novell/SUSE alternative in its place.
Not so easy in a server room, especially in a mixed Windows/*nix server room where Novell's deal with Microsoft doesn't bother management in the slightest, even if you can explain it to them.
An "upgrade" to Red Hat might be the sort of thing that could be explained to the average PHB though, especially if you can make a cost-savings case for it.
We can expect marketing campaigns from Red Hat and Oracle anytime now, with "upgrade" deals waved around.
Dump all MONO development for any of the many excellent alternatives, and abandon your investment in all Novell-based open or closed source tools.
Sounds easier: Mono hasn't established a significant base in the corporate market yet. And if Sun GPLs Java, you could even start presenting Java as not just more open, but also least-likely-to-be-sued.
Weird times.
Perhaps it was an unfair prejudgement on my part, but when Novell picked up SuSE, I went on. Having ridden the "Big Red" bus in the past, I wanted no part of Novell's nonsensical business decisions. SuSE was/is a fine distro, but there are so so many others out there that are better and truly free (CentOS anyone). What is their consumer base these days? Have they really grown since Novell bought them? They used to be huge in Europe, are they still? Perhaps it's ignorance talking, but SuSE just doesn't seem to be anywhere near the distro player that they used to be. Will they really be missed?
test
does this mean all those nifty windows virus's I miss out on my SuSE box will now function as designed?
Yeah, I saw a yard gnome once, it didn't scare me - Space Ghost
Why would they have to? I was a long time Novell fan, but I eventually had to admit that Novell is no longer relevant in the world today.
The truth is that MS just needs to standby if they want Novell to go away. This seems more like an attempt by them to keep the company alive so they can site them as "competition" for antitrust purposes.
I doubt that Novell will be able turn themselves around like Apple did, they have a history of making terrible business decisions.
As I offered earlier:
"Under the patent cooperation agreement, Novell's customers receive directly from Microsoft a covenant not to sue. Novell does not receive a patent license or covenant not to sue from Microsoft, and we have not agreed with Microsoft to any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL. Our agreement does not affect the freedom that Novell or anyone else in the open source community, including developers, has under the GPL and does not impose any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL. Therefore, the agreement is fully compliant with the GPL,"
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4685037869.html
That reminds me of another, historical, agreement:
"Under the treaty, England receives directly from Germany a promise not to attack Poland. England does not receive a promise not to attack Germany, and we have not agreed with Germany to any condition that would contradict the conditions of previous treaties. Our agreement does not affect the freedom that Poland or any other country in Europe, including France, has under previous treaties and does not impose any condition that would contradict the conditions of such treaties. Therefore, the treaty is fully compliant with all previous treaties."
Sincerely,
Neville Chamberlain
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Mono sucks. Beagle is the best example of something that, if you don't remove it, will regularly max out your cpu. There is no room for a .exe on my massive hard drives.
Novell apparently did this because they wanted to protect mono. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And now that Java is being open-sourced under the GPL, mono will become even more irrelevant. Talk about bad timing.
There's no reason people can't fork SuSE and OpenSUSE if they want to, or use it as the basis for something else ... or download another distro, or switch to BSD. There are a lot of alternatives - unlike when you get into bed with Microsoft, which is just a case of BOGUS - Bend Over, Grease Up, Sucker!
I'll run into our director of developement's office,
"Bad news sir, we need to uninstall SUSE right now and migrate all 30 boxes to another linux!"
"What? Why?"
"MS is bad and makes deals with Novel, if we keep SUSE our linux geek cred score will go down by MANY MANY points. We can't have that."
"...are you high again?"
"...maybe"
It appears that if you go to a discussion with a comment whose cid is less than 16777215 and post a reply, the reply works properly. However, if the parent's cid is greater than that, the Parent link won't work or won't show up.
Its called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, my friend. We've seen it before, and we'd be surprised not to see it again. A dog kicked several times cowers. Or bites.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Because discussions on the Microsoft/Novell deal aren't the place to talk about the broken comment system?
It's not likely the editors would be able to fix it anyway (plus, they don't even read submissions, why would they read the comments?), if you want it fixed, notify the maintainers of Slashcode.
Almost all of our servers were being installed with SUSE. The second that was announced, the company announced it was now standardizing on Red Hat. We'll be spending the next year moving the servers over to Red Hat and all new servers are getting installing with RHEL
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
What about all of our enterprise apps that are running on mono? As long as my huge company that relies upon those apps 24/7 can still get the support they need, let the world move along as it wishes!
Dang I used to just love SUSE Linux. Their documentation was simply the best. Now their wrapped up with Novell, Microsoft...must ponder this change.
I have a small server that I run FTP and some java game servers on (MegaMek) I've used SuSE as it was my first distro, but I use ubuntu for my desktop environments. Before this post, after hearing about M$ and novell working together, I decided I'm switching my server over to another distro. I have yet to decide which though, but I'm getting rid of SuSE like the plague as is my buddy who I just unfortunatly got hooked up with SuSE.
Damn!
FreeBSD is starting to look pretty damn good again!
MS DNA in the GPL via SuSE?
:(
Gather the troops.
... it really didn't take as long as I thought it would to download and
burn the Fedora Core 6 "Zod" CDs.
The bad news is that I bought a copy of SuSE 10.1 that I never got around
to installing, and never will. I'm sorry that Novell didn't bother to notice
that there are some of us willing to go down to CompUSA and buy their
shrink-wrapped product, even it was just to get the paper copy of the manual.
If I had more spare disks, I'd give Debian Etch a try, too.
So long, SuSE - the 10.1 kit was either the 5th or 6th box of yours that I bought -
it's been such a long time, I've forgotten exactly how many. Enjoy getting screwed
by Microsoft...
.. Like we're really that stupid to believe everything on Slashdot is a trap.
The article called something FUD, and that part of the article was in and of itself FUD>
So, lets get this straight, the quotes, paraphrased:
(1) Novell admits no infringement on IP or patented code
(2) Novell is paying MS to keep itself and it's customers from being sued for using MS IP in it's products.
So...
The article is saying (2) suggests that (1) is a lie. Now, IANAL, but it seems to me, if you are paying a royalty for copyrighted/patented/IP stuff, then there is no infringement, so in that matter, (2) actually gurantees that (1) is correct with respect to MS, correct?
So, to keep Linux safe, just make sure that the rest of Linux takes no code from SUSE from this point forward.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Microsoft appears to be making a strategic alliance with Novell. So what. It's unlikely MS will use this to try to crush competing Linux distros- there is no way they would succeed, and we would all boycott MS AND Novell if they tried something stupid and evil like that. See the SCO vs. IBM case for what happened last time MS tried to destroy Linux- we'd all ignore MS's fud, and they would lose a lot of money in court.
/.ers are afraid of that- but believe me, there are bigger things to worry about. You should use the OS that best suits your needs- be it Ubuntu, Debian, SuSe, Windows, or OSX.
Also, Novell's code is under the GPL. This means that anything Microsoft lets Novell do can be used by anyone else. Thus, MS can't use this to make a 'MS only' version of Linux. In fact, thanks to the GPL, anything Microsoft does to help Novell can help the community as a whole.
Microsoft is not the Devil. Everything they touch is not automatically unclean and corrupted. The worst MS could do is help Novell create a Linux distro that is the standard by which other distros are judged. I know many
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
"It just seems odd to me that people are foaming at the mouth over this."
Not if you remember that when Novell made Gnome the default desktop in their Novell Linux Desktop product the boards went berserk claiming that Novell had set out to destroy KDE. It turned out KDE was still supported and is still the default desktop in Novell Enterprise products. The current outcry is predictable if you remember the previous ones.
Novell's mission is to make linux mainstream in enterprises that can afford to pay them for software maintenance, so their strategy makes sense when viewed in that context. Linux suffers from a lot of designed in nuisances that made it a great system for geeks who like mastering diverse, obscure obstacles, but a poor one for general acceptance. Novell is working to improve that, so resistance from geeks who don't really want linux 'dumbed down' for people who just want to get their work done is understandable.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
As I have written previously, the whole thing is primarily a publicity stunt on the part of Microsoft. By being able to point at deals like this, they can attempt to claim that there is something to their claims that they have intellectual property that Linux may infringe on. In addition, the reason the whole thing started is, I believe, a bunch of patents Novell asserted against Microsoft, not the other way around.
But in the end, the deal is legally meaningless because Novell cannot protect just its own customers from lawsuits over (L)GPL software; yes, Novell can agree to cover their customers' legal costs, but should Microsoft ever assert any patents against anybody on a piece of (L)GPL'ed software, Novell's customers have to stop using the software in question (well, technically, they'd just not get any updates, but that amounts to the same thing) just like everybody else, since the (L)GPL does not permit redistribution of software that's patent encumbered.
Potentially, this deal could be used by Microsoft to establish that their patents are "valuable", but I think courts aren't that stupid either. Furthermore, we have had several "worst-case scenarios" involving patents, open source software, and litigious companies, and their long term effect has been nil: open source seems to be able to work around intellectual property issues quite effectively.
In the end, Microsoft has given several hundred million dollars to an open source company for a legally meaningless move and the ability to spread a bunch of FUD. It probably would have looked better for Novell to turn them down, but I don't see it as a really big problem that they didn't, and it's a big chunk of change that will probably fund more open source development.
So, should you still use SuSE? I don't particularly like the company; I think they have always been excessively fond of software whose licenses I consider questionable (including Java and Qt). But I don't see them as a big threat either, and they are contributing to the community. In the end, the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, except that an open source company is several hundred million dollars richer, which can't be all that bad.
What a great occasion to celebrate the 1st semi-stable release of OpenSuse 10.2 - beta2.
Thats not really a fair comparison, doubly so if you compare against a modern distro like ubuntu. For the linux version, you assume that the graphics drivers and X are not setup. IIRC ubuntu installs these by default, but otherwise are just an apt-get away. If apt-get is too complex, then just fire up synaptic with all its GUI clickity goodness (and IIRC there is now another GUI package manager than just lists the major package-sets by user-friendly names without breaking it down to all the detailed deb package names). Compare this to a Windows XP machine, while it will come with a bunch of several year old drivers, chances are you will need to spend the next couple of hours looking around the net searching for drivers, and then installing each individual program from a CD or downloading them one by one. Maybe your comparison would be more fair if you said that the Windows XP machine was fully setup and configured by the vendor, and the user knew several friends would would help her do simple tasks like install a new program, and that this user was not willing to spend a little bit of time trying to figure out how to solve problems herself and would be more likely to say "OMG this doesn't work... help!!!" as soon as the first popup box that mentioned the word "error" in it appeared. I admit that learning how to properly sysadmin a linux box does have a steeper learning curve than a windows machine (spreading the learning curve for windows over a decade, while working on fully setup machines does make it seem less steep anyway), I'd far prefer to sysadmin a linux box than a windows box. The biggest points against linux at the moment are mostly non-technical ones. Most people are familiar with windows, already have things setup (or been setup) the way they like things (or at least know which buttons to click), know a couple of "techies" who they can ask questions to when things go wrong, and don't usually want to put any time/effort into learning new things. For linux, which doesn't usually come pre-installed with a tech-support helpline, first requires a crash course in sysadmin'ing a machine (how to I partition my hard disk, backup all my old data, setup a bootloader and find compatable/cross-platform applications so I can keep accessing all my data). The very same problems would plague windows if linux has 90% market share and people wanted to try out windows. Also note that most Vista installs will be on new machines, and upgrades will overwite the old OS (thus skipping the whole backup/partition/bootloader issue). For linux to become mainstream, it needs to be significantly better than windows (or for MS to piss people off enough to overcome their ineria). The next big step will be getting linux installed by the big name vendors (as an option) and offering basic tech-support for it. This is just starting to happen (a few isolated models here and there), but is taking its time.
Microsoft are trying to bring linux into its own incarnation of the computing world, as every other major competitor to them in this field has faded into insignificance, or gone entirely. Basically they could beat linux if it was competing in the same way they work.
However it isn't, and I think microsoft just haven't grasped that. Open source (which seems to be a phrase under constant re-interpretation), has one interesting attribute, only the fittest survive, not the 'richest'. Money has never equalled success in the FOSS world. Although it can help a truly good product get better, it can't save a bad one. This is entirely different to the closed source world, where money can indeed prop up crap software (IE anyone?).
SUSE has never been the best distro, and its not very populer among the hobbyist userbase. All it has going for it is that microsoft and Novell have an established history of working together, something microsoft don't have with any other linux distributor.
Microsoft had no choice but to pick SUSE, so they have to get what they can from this deal by way of leverage on the linux install base.
They have already proved themselves capable of throwing billions into enterprises that make no money, so the idea that they could push 'microsoft aproved' linux at a loss to corporations and reap benefits by being perceived as an aproved software portal for the corporate world in this new era is entirely plausible.
That would equal control, and that further means they can 'phase out' linux, because they control it, as it 'just isn't good enough'.
Alas, this is a house of cards, and it just won't work. The plain fact is that open source has never really been something one entity controls, so this deal with Novell will harm SUSE, but not gnu/linux as a whole. Microsofts real target is Red Hat, being as they are the major player in the corporate linux world, and Novell is as close as they can get to the Red Hat camp, close enough (they think) to harm its install base.
Yup, SUSE will be harmed, Red Hat may get pinched a bit, but FOSS is controlled by hundreds of thousands of developers, and will barely notice this event. Politics don't generally hurt hackers or prevent them from coding into the night, that's what mailing lists are for. You can't kill FOSS by finding bit of it and jumping up and down on it, and the open source world will always have a nasty habit of pulling a new unexpected innivation out that will deal a serious blow to any advance microsoft have made.
I won't be having anything to do with any novell products now, not that I did much already, I'd decided a long time back that SUSE didn't do linux the way I liked it.
While companies can work out their own deals, and they might be able to do naughty things while still complying with GPLv2, we should be looking at our big deal. The GPL is the closest thing the free software community has to a social contract. We should be looking into how to prevent such harm for v3 of the GPL.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Microsoft gets ready to launch the new cash cow, while at the same time, Linux deals with a nice fat FUD sandwich for a year or so while all this is sorted out. When a company has enough cash to buy your very soul, no amount of criticism or complaining can substitute for competition.
A lot of time over the past 3 years that could have gone into inproving installs for new users, device drivers, and UI, has gone into endless chatter over the GPL and other issues that in the end, don't forward or develop marketshare.
Watch, as your futures burn. Vista can stink to high-heaven, but by March of next year, it will take over and leave us in the dust. Shelves will begin to fill with Vista-ready software, and we will get to once again remember what it must have felt like to have a network based on OS/2 and wonder where the fuck are the apps!
"Better" aint good enough, it never was, it never will be. Until you are ready to kick the giant in the balls, just as Microsoft did to IBM, nothing is going to change. How about a unified device driver model? How about some consolidation? Microsoft treats software as a business. Linux companies treat software as a self esteem project. "Money and profits? Who cares, baby? I can run five flavors of Linux on a 486, and stream video to my PDA for FREE, bitch!"
Will we ever learn? I doubt it. Listen to the laughter coming from Redmond......
One of the reasons I'm using SuSE at home (and on the Linux lab that I run at a local community college) is that SuSE comes with a huge number of packages. If there's something I need, it's probably on the DVD, and I don't have to go through the "infinite regress of dependencies."
I like Kubuntu, but its treatment of root is a bit different than what most books describe. That's minor; I'm certainly willing to write some extra material for my students.
In any event, I'd like to know what people are switching to, and why.
If Microsofts intention with this deal was to destroy Linux you are surely doing them a favor by writing rants like this.
In the beginning of the article, Nic quotes Novell:
Novell makes no admission that its Linux and open source offerings infringe on any other parties' patents.
And than a few lines later claims:
Wait. Didn't we just read that no such infringements exist?
Sorry, but I do not read such a claim from Novell. They refuse to admit infringements, but in my understanding, this is not the same. Novell's statement is standard comment to protect them against false claims, such as that there are no patent infringements in their code. (Claiming to be fully patant infringement free is, as we all know, impossible to demonstrate.)
With all due respect for Nicholas Petreley, this article starts off with the wrong premise. The rest is a personal opinion, but not related to its stated reasons.
Then he goes on to say near the end:
However question #1 in the FAQ is: How is this agreement compatible with Novell's obligations under Section 7 of the GPL? and the reply is:
It also goes on to say that there was no threat of a law suit. so if he's going to call for lawyers to go after Novell for breaching the section 7 of the GPL.........maybe he should get some proof that they did?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
All the GPL people are going to go around ripping peoples servers appart and reinstalling OS's that arent supported by application vendors? Good luck with that. If I was your manager I would question your commitment to the company you are working for as an admin, since you are so happy to keep reinstalling stuff.
I bought the deluxe package right around the time Novell delivered the smack-down to SCO about who owned the copyrights, and who was allowed to waive alleged breaches of the licenses. I figured it was the least I could do to reward Novell for stepping in between the rabid chihuahua and the sleeping giant, and so I plunked down my $90 or something like that.
Now I will take the DVD's and CD's (I'm keeping the nice case they came in), and mailing them to Novell, maybe even directly to Hovsepian's attention, as a statement of sorts that I don't need a turncoat's software on my machines.
Novell is FUDing just like SCO, except now MS is directly and visibly involved. "nice distro you have there, wouldn't want any bad patent litigation to happen to it, maybe you should buy a support contract from Novell and we'll protect you from MS."
-paul
One of the facts about Suse/Novell is that they are 'Free' (as in speech) to do deals with 'every' ./ers arch enemy MS
You might not like the direction they are going in, but you are also 'Free' to take GPLd code and write your very own GNU/Linux distribution.
If, like me you have neither the time or skill to do that, then be grateful that there is wide choice of Free (beer/speech) distros out there for you to take your pick from. If you really like one and want to support their product and ethos, then you should give 'em a few ££, help fix some code or something similar
It doesn't suprise me one little bit that two major software companies would sigh a strategic deal. And it probably shouldn't suprise you either.....
echo $SIGNATURE
I see a lot of people complaining about this. Companies are pretty much stuck with 2 choices for file storage and enterprise email/calendaring/etc: Microsoft (Windows server, AD, Exchange, etc) and Novell (SUSE, eDirectory, Groupwise, etc). What other choices do we have for companies with more than 100 or 200 users?
Who has the legal right to sell its ownership of XenSource?
If Novell can do this to Microsoft,
I would like to be the first chap to offer the world "My cool RPM System".
It is the same RPM system that RedHat spent the last 13 years building.
But mine is special. Whats the difference? If you don't use mine, I get to sue you.
Wow. Let me get this straight. There is one quoted fact -- consisting of ~2 sentences -- in this article. The rest... well, I've summed it up above.
Perhaps the sky isn't falling just yet.
The beauty of linux! If your distro of choice goes south you still have three or four great options to choose from. distrowatch.com Try Ubuntu, Mepis, Mandriva, or Fedora.
Let us not wait what will happen in, say a year.
Also let us not look at it objectivaly and let us completely ignore what Novell has done for the Open Source community. Just let us drop them and then hope that Novell goes broke and some others fill in the void that will happen.
Also let us ignore the fact that Novell is not SCO or the Novell is also interested in seeing that the deal is coplying with the GPL
Also let us forget all the Novell suported projects
It is great to so that people are not realy pro Linux, but are rather anti-Microsoft.
Yes, we should watch the deal closely and decide when things go wrong. To decide now will not do anybody any good, execpt perhaps RedHat, who are happily joining in the FUD for obvious reasons.
Oh, this was all sarcastic.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I was a loyal SUSE user since 6.3 in late 1999. With 10.0 and the switch to OpenSUSE came a lot of problems I never had before; broken updates, problems installing stuff from third-parties (like packman), etc. I switched to Gentoo over the summer, and I'm quite happy with it. My roommate hung on through SUSE 10.1, but the problems only got worse. He just switched to Kubuntu, and it seems to be working quite well.
Back when Novell first acquired SUSE, there were a lot of people saying "Oh great, Novell gets to kill another great product." I didn't want to listen then, but now I think they were right. It would be nice if Novell used some of whatever MS is giving them to try and bring SUSE back up to it's historic quality standards, but I've spent too much time in Corporate America to have any hope of that actually happening.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Perhaps the Linux mascot should be changed. Instead of a penguin, we could use a lemming.
Well, I guess I can kiss my karma goodbye, now.
This is in response to Concern's Post concerning GPL Section 7. Hopefull it will get read, even though I have to post as Anonymous Coward at the moment.
What you are neglecting is that same clause applies to everyone. If a piece of software violates a patent and you cannot secure a royalty-free license that applies to everyone who redistributes the software, then you can't can't license it under the GPL. If it turns out that Microsoft has patents that cover the operation of GPL'd software, and Microsoft will only provide a patent license to Novell customers, then everyone who distributes it will be in violation of the GPL, not just Novell. Furthermore, it is unlikely that MS would sue a free software developer over patent infringement, out of fear of being counter sued by IBM. Therefore from both a legal and practical standpoint, this part of the deal (there is more to it) changes nothing for either Novell or the rest of the free software community, with regard to patents.
Of course this does not weaken your arguement that software patents are a bad thing - it strengthens it. No author of software, proprietary or free, can possibly check that they are not in violation of a patent before hand. The entire industry ignores the issue while writing sofware in hopes it won't bite them because there is little they can do to prevent it. Larger companies secure some degree of safety by cross-licenseing, but this isn't an option for smaller projects, and offers no protection from the patent-trolls that do not produce any products and thus can't be counter sued. Software patents are a big problem for the entire industry - but it should be pointed free software isn't at more risk than any other small company. If anything free software has an advantage over small companies, in that they have less money to bleed. Those projects are, however, more limited as they can't license "legitimate" patents (on media formats etc).
It never makes good business sense to support your competitors, unless of course you benefit in some way...now or in the future. No one is looking at the community here. It's the bottom line they care about on both sides. Business is war! Prepare for battle! ;-)
The first time I used SUSE, I had a terrible experience. I installed it, mostly with the default options, and the updater was broken. It couldn't even download updates. It was SUSE 10.1. I don't understand how they could release an OS with such a critical bug. It kind of soured my on the whole idea of SUSE. Which is kind of sad, since It had such a nice UI.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Novell thinks they are now in partnership with Microsoft.
IBM, Lotus and many others thought the same.
our part of the deal is to spend the next five minutes, months, or years migrating away from every shred of Novell/SUSE software in our home, office, or enterprise."
But that certainly seems like a win/win for Microsoft.
So, a Linux company makes a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft will agree to not sue the pants off of Novell. Novell licenses Microsoft tech. Why is everyone complaining. They made a deal, but I'd wager that there's more to it right now than meets the eye...
The only thing I can say is maybe Novell is licensing some tech to make Windows Apps run better on Linux through, maybe, say, Wine.
Oh, no, no they can't do that you'll yell.
Cedega does. There are parts of Wine that Cedega doesn't open source. I.E. the proprietary libraries.
Novell for a long time has asked which apps users want to see run on Linux. I'd wager that this "deal" that people are whining about will actually HELP the adoption of Linux versions of software, if Novell is going down this path.
= Grow a brain...
On November 20, 2011, Novell's CEO (or his sucessor) will announce:
This morning Novell management emailed our top Microsoft management contacts in Redmond giving them final notice that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their allegations against Debian, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received. We can't tell if there is a problem with their Exchange server, or not, but no reply has been received. Consequently, this company is at war with Microsoft.
You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win Suse acceptance has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more, or anything different, that I could have done, and that would have been more successful... We have a clear conscience, we have done all that any company could do to establish Suse, but a situation in which no word given by Ballmer could be trusted, and no customers or company could feel themselves safe from litigation, had become intolerable... Now may God bless you all and may He defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against, brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression, and persecution. And against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
I do not like SUSE too but these only from the technical point of view.
So lets just assume that M$ is looking for another market to sell M$ product to and hope that it brings M$ functionality to Linux. Now I know that a bunch of people will now scream OXYMORON "M$ functionality", but for me M$ does have a working function, it's just not on the OS I like. I say, allow me to use the OS that I want and use any software that I want. I just wish MAC would allow me to put some of their software on Linux or Windows, cause they also have some cool stuff.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
"Wake up SUSE customers, wake up. Novell is jeopardizing the future of Linux for its own short-term rewards."
Perhaps they're moving Linux into the realm it needs to be in, in order to succeed. I personally think this will be interesting and could end up helping Linux (of course I'm not completely discounting the possibility of failure)...
The whole Novel/MS deal is just a way to ensure that each party has 100 million reasons not to sue the other party. From a business point of view this is a good settlement. From a Linux point of view, it is meaningless and doesn't change anything.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's too bad, SuSE was a good distro. I hope that Novell understands that they are driving people away from it by doing this.
I'm considering:
1) Debian
2) Ubuntu
3) Roll my own Linux Distro.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Let me put it this way; The only concrete reason anyone outside a corporation has to install Vista is for (new) games. For me anywayz, FreeBSD has pretty much everything else covered now...Seriously.
I still dual-boot XP for graphics editing and a few other things, and will for the foreseeable future...but in my own mind, Vista is for the birds. The fact that WoW works relatively easily with Wine means I will still be able to play that in the future as well.
XGL/Compviz is available elsewhere..
/everywhere/..
YaST is available elsewhere..
The GNOME2/Nautilus desktop is available
Easy Samba, WiFi, LDAP, Windows Terminal Services, and other "office-y" stuff is available elsewhere..
Ubuntu, ubuntu, ubuntu, ubuntu. Debian, debian, debian, debian. CentOS, OpenSolaris, Gentoo, RHEL.
--
The only thing SUSE has going for it is the Novell support backing, and only corporate installations care about that. With the Oracle/RedHat support deal that factor carries less momentum.
Novell Linux is an interim reality.
Microsoft is trying to get everyone (under the threat of future IP litigation) to move to Novell/SUSE. The five year deal gives them the time to create a migration tool that works perfectly with Novell/SUSE products. When the five years expire, you will be forced to migrate to Windows or lose your supported environment. My best guess is that this will also coincide with Microsoft's software-as-a-service and server hosting solution using Hypervisor (thier supposed vmware killer) technologies.
With all the 'death to Novell' posts here about this deal I have yet to read one informative comment on what the real motivations are for MS making this deal. On the outside of this deal it seems that MS is Santa Clause and is giving away 300+ million and a 'covenant not to sue' which would be worth less than the paper its printed on - which would only come in handy if you run out of toilet paper. I call this stupid money because I cant see how MS is going to get their ROI from this investment. If I was Novell I would also take this handout for the bad PR they get for making a deal with the devil, they also get a 300+M and endorsement/certification that this would be the best distro to work with MS products.
.NET (mono) than it does to do with virtualisation.
So what benefits *exactly* are MS getting from all this?
I for one thinks this has more to do with an endorsement of cross platform
Anyone have any plausible ideas?
Microsoft just figured out how to make all the people who hate them say and think Microsoft 5000 times in one slashdot post... $350M for that kind of geek thoughtspace is probably cheap from a marketing standpoint.
Scroll down to an ad for VS.NET, Microsoft pops into your mind once. Scroll thru this thread, and you've just spent a half hour singing "Micro-soft!" to yourself with every post you read.
Clever bastards.
meh
It may be a troll, but having just installed the nvidia drivers on my new SuSE installation, and then Kicad,. . . so where is the poster wrong?
Novell, like other distros, has added non-GPL code to the Linux base system. Is it possible that they say Linux and open source do not violate any patents, but paid to cover patient violations in non-GPL code added to Suse by Novell??
Let me tell you about my latest Microsoft support experience. I asked them how to fix the problem of booting XP from a physical disk in VMWare from inside Fedora. XP will force you to activate Windows every time you boot and it sees "new hardware", effectively invalidating all of your past activations. The Microsoft support "tech" said "it sounds like you are having problems with Linux, visit www.redhat.com. Are you f**king kidding me?
With support like this, why would anyone continue to use Microsoft products? If I need help with a problem in GNU/Linux, I'm only a Google search away from my answer, ALWAYS.
Well, SuSE is still running all my Oracle instances quite well, and until I see some dynamic shift I am not going to do anything drastic because a potential deal. You have two scenarios to look at, Apple, and Sybase. I remember the Apple fanatics (which I might fit in, but I will never tell) screamed about how it was the end of Apple when they invested into an failing Apple. Everything turned out fine. Now Sybase is a different story, which I think is everyones fears. I think this was a move by Novell to get some needed funding, especially at a time when Red Hat is being made out to be a bad guy by Oracle. This also might be the bridge to getting Microsoft to run their apps on Linux. Who knows, We might see Microsoft do a similar move to Apple, and stack their proprietary API's on top of a linux foundation (Apple on top of Darwin/BSD anyone?) For a group that screams that Microsoft stifles innovation, actions like this prove that zealots and those who are afraid of change are to blame as well.
Yeah, yeah. That's right! Kick Novell out of the club!
I think we should hide the source code in a different place, too. So that even if Novell rats us out, they won't be able to tell MS where the hideout is.
Companies that make deals with Microsoft often are unhappy. Microsoft only makes deals when it needs to and does not enjoy them. Novell got burns as many others have in the past. Since I have seen a higher percentage of companies who partner with Microsoft disappear shortly after, or become wounded badly, I avoid those companies. I expect them to go away. I worked for such a company. This is Microsoft's special game, and their good. I see no reason to use SUSE, more than I do now. Partly due to the deal, and partly due to my attraction to bar raising distros like Ubuntu. If I relied on SUSE for my business this would only be one reason to move away from SUSE, but not a large enough one to reinstall everything this weekend.
Time will tell what this is all about. Some legal action might dig up the behind the scenes paper work and Microsoft's motivation for this. If might turn out they had some kind of "Master Plan", which is what I would think. They don't do things for not reason at all. But as a "Master Plan" is seem really stupid.
I'm advising people that I know, work with/for to stay away from SUSE, but there is more than one reason for that.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
"one of them actively contributes, and the other is saying it will help with interoperability."
Some of us don't want interoperability..
A large portion of the Linux community abandoned M$ and switched to Linux because we HATE M$.
Some of us worship the incompatibility of the two systems.
IMO it's the best thing about Linux..
Companies make deals all the time, SUSE is now part of NOVELL which is a company, a much bigger company than SUSE was at the time of the buyout. From a enterprise standpoint, this has the potential to big huge for not only LINUX but for SUSE/NOVELL for grabbing datacenter rights from our friends at Red Hat. I will say NOVELL should tread softly when working with Microsoft, no doubt but even if it bites them in the butt your looking at it effect SUSE more so than LINUX.
I truly enjoy LINUX and want it to make strides so if this deal proves helps make usability better than heck, I'm for it. Cause I agree with the OP, Though various distros have made installing apps much eaiser it still can be tricky from time to time. Then having to educate people what the difference between a .deb and .rpm is (or even .tgz for that matter), after a while they get that blank look on their face. Also, explaining you can't just pickup any ole cd from the store and run it also a bit daunting.
At any rate my opinion on the whole matter is that it is 50/50 or a stale mate and it won't be the end of linux since SUSE is just 1 distro out of MANY.
I hate to say, but look at OSX, being BSD based and has all the features people are complaining about here between the 'elitist' and the plain-ol' users. And it's Apple so you know there's profit being made and power suers to the plain-ol' users love it. Linux could improve & incorporate on the OSX features like install, config, and setup (by now). Why it hasn't in any distro I've seen yet boogles my mind.
I forsee a South Park episode on the topic you describe Anonymous Coward :p. Cartman will become a Linux Zealot once he figures out how to run World of Warcraft with Wine and then goes on a crusade to change every computer in South Park to "Cubuntu" his own distro. All goes well until Steve Jobs comes to town to promote OS X where a big fight like Santa vs Jesus breaks out. Steve Balmer finds out and heads down to South Park and what an episode it will be!
Like, in 6.66 months. After all, the devil's in the details.
Novel detonate himself.
/dev/null
Any self respected Linux Zealot will show no mercy against SuSE in support boards even Tech talk in IT room. After than that no more nice words about SuSE.
Novell the Betrayer...
Like caldera, they are dead now.
The End, Game over, finish, finito.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Er... is this post from 4 years ago when Quake 3 was actually released, or..?
I recently watched4 people in my office convert to Ubuntu from Windows as their primary desktop. They've been running for months and love it. They haven't hardly TOUCHED a command line ot do anything, especially not install or update software. You get a nice "Updates Available" icon in your tray and you just click it to update - and guess what, no rebooting required!
Even if Novell do whore out to Micro$oft, i'm still content this is the best Linux i've used!
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
I used to work for Microsoft - and I know for a fact that Microsoft want to kill Linux. This has been stated time and time again internally. It is a main objective of the company.
www.boycottnovell.com
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg0023 8.html (bug is marked private, so see here -and yes, I know I'm gonna get "zomg fuckfest" answers here as well)
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg0002 7.html (someone is in panic)
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg0004 2.html (someone is leaving opensuse)
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg0012 6.html (someone is telling suse people they got screwed)
Let me be clear. I am a S.u.S.E. customer. I have every distro of S.u.S.E. prefessional since
version 6.0. Every one. My favorite is from the kernel 2.4 as it has yet the shredder that was
sold down the river by microsoft stooges who made up the support in the 2.6 kernel. We do not
need to take a good distro like S.u.S.E., my loyal Deutschen Freund off of our computers. We only
need not to by the new ones put out by Novell. Our distro is no longer. It is now Novell, not
S.u.S.E. I will keep my trusty old distros with their free compilers of many languages and eschew
buying any new ones. Until S.u.S.E. becomes free of the stink of monopolism, I will buy new or download
new ones from Mandrake "mandriva as they were extorted to call themselves by a damn comic book
monopoly'. I will also buy or download or contribute to new ones from Debian and Ubuntu. I will
never give in to monopoly control of my computer or anyone elses computer. S.u.S.E. was stolen
by those vultures and I will never forgive them for that. Microsoft is good only for games.
The world is slowly turning left. The day will come when the microsofties of the world will be
seen by all for the bane on humanity that they are. One day they will sit in the dock of a real
court of justice to be tried for crimes against the people of the world. When the litigants of
old widows and poor children are finally in prison for their crimes, and the hated 'intellectual
property' dark ages are finally over, the light of hope will again illuminate the world.
I stopped using SuSe when they attached "Novell" to its name. Can't ever be a good sign.
"It's a time machine Napoleon, I bought it online."
I've been using SUSE since 8.2 (If you refer to Novell, they'll tell you it's "SUSE", the only time "SuSE" is still used is in "SuSEconfig", and "SuSe" is just wrong) and I used to be a loyal SUSE Fanatic. I loved KDE, YaST, Qt, Helix etc.. Since then, Novell have moved Helix from AmaroK to Banshee, Implemented gtk# apps with mono, moved SUSE largely to GNOME, and played down the usefulness of YaST with zmd and extra gnome-control-center addons. And, you'd think this would disillusion me from SUSE, but... I actually really like the changes Novell have made. SUSE is now by far the best OS I've experienced for my needs. I am not about to abandon it over an ethical issue which is just fiery zealotry and has no true backing. Were SUSE still like it was in say.. 9.2, perhaps I would. Unlike most of the zealots here, I've actually done some work for MS in the past. They aren't evil, they're just capitalist. Microsoft are not the big baddies and they never were. Any company that attains monopoly tends to act pseudo-legally and inethically at times, it's just because once a business gets a market share, they will do as much as possible to keep it, and to keep upward growth going. Anyone that's done High School Business studies would know a business has initial growth, stability, then either decline or further growth. A business cannot stay the same, you have to go forward. Microsoft is doing that and using their primary bargaining chip - market share, to leverage that. I personally think Microsoft's products suck, but I know several computer professionals that use windows, and can provide clear arguments as to why they *don't* use linux. Likewise, I can provide reasons that I *don't* use MS products. It's different software for different goals and needs. Novell have made some great decisions with SUSE, and I don't think this one spells doom for all us Linux users.
I am surprised that Novell didn't choke when they swallowed Digital Research. They fought tooth and nail with Microsoft over the life of their new child DR-DOS. If people were on the fence about Novell, the stink of Microsoft night be enough to push them off in any other direction. The latest version of ubuntu 6.10 was an unfortunate situation. Admittedly it needed more work before release. Anyone not happy with it should really go back and try ubuntu-6.06.01 and they will find that it installs flawlessly. I have been extremely happy with it on a number of platforms. At the time Novell bought Suse, I had a lcense from Novell to try all their software, but Novell's verswion of Suse was one or two versions back from what I could buy at CompUSA. I just couldn't see using obsolete software. I just tried out Oracle's Enterprise Linux (or is it Red Hat's Linux?). I had major trouble installing it. The install failed a number of times, and not from bad media. I finally got it working, but it was much more trouble than ubuntu.
Really?
I am shocked.
Positively shocked.
This reply is to posto 25 above it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Open source is an idea whose time has come. And it was Victor Hugo who said: "You can't fight an idea whose time has come". Again, I suspect Microsoft knows this. Hence the Novell deal.
I'm a Marxist. I don't know if this will ring true since you're probably not, but... Socialism is an idea whose time has come. It can sure as hell be fought, though. Open source will probably, like socialism, never go away but it can be fought indefinitely. We communists have learned to not talk of inevitability.
Property is theft.
Your imaginative utopian vision aside, have you heard ANYTHING from Novell about SLED (the Novell SuSE-based enterprise desktop distro) since the MS announcement?
My hands-on review of SLED10 just got published.
In which I say that "Vista-killer" as applied to SLED10 is hype, but SLED11 might actually be a "Vista-killer". I define this as a Linux distro which can be run by an average home user if the OS is preinstalled and will handle what the average computer user needs done and on which that user can install things without the help of a Linux guru.
Of course, this isn't merely true of SuSE distros, Lin/freespire (which I just tested, don't know when that review comes out) is at about that point, and I'd say the same for Fedora Core 6 (which I'm testing right now)... one more rev and we're likely to see "people-ready" Linux distros all over the place.
It's too late to put Linux servers back in the bottle, perhaps the preventive action MS has in mind is to interfere with desktop development.
As for "in at the door of Fortune 500 companies", perhaps you've heard of IBM or HP?
Disclaimer: what's in the above does not represent the opinion of techbuilder.org or its parent company, CMP.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Hooray Microsoft, baby killing, and vomit!
Microsoft didn't build a better mousetrap, just a mousetrap that is easier to set. When the Linux community realizes that RTFM is not a corporate, non-Linux expert, friendly piece of advice then Linux will continue to be the choice of those with the requisite skills to implement and employ Linux. If SUSE learns how to adopt Microsoft's ease of use technology, then maybe SUSE can find a way to user desktops.