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openSUSE Launches 11.1
Novell has unveiled their latest release to the openSUSE line with 11.1. Offering both updates and new features, Novell continues to push for more openness and transparency. The new release includes Linux kernel 2.6.27, Python 2.6, Mono 2.0, OpenOffice 3.0, and many others. "[...] Our choice was also influenced by impressive changes that are transpiring in the openSUSE community, which is growing rapidly and is also becoming more open, inclusive, and transparent. Last month, the project announced its first community-elected board, a major milestone in its advancement towards community empowerment. This is a very good openSUSE release and it delivers some very impressive enhancements. The distro has evolved tremendously in the past two releases and is becoming a very solid and usable option for regular users."
People say this stuff, but the truth is that Novell doesn't love Microsoft, they just see a business opportunity and a legal wrangle.
If Microsoft wanted to take on Novell again, they'd need a chair. AND a gun. AND a dog.
If I wanted to use SUSE, I would without fear. It's not Microsoft that I'm afraid of. It's Google. M$ is in decline. Google is not.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Novell is "pushing" for more openness? Why does it take "pushing"? Novell owns SuSE - it can just open it as much as it wants. Finally opening the project governance to the community that's been contributing for years isn't even "pushing", or at least not harder than inertia.
Novell does seem to be gradually getting around to opening SuSE. Which is good. But since SuSE could be doing even better if Novell just opened it more, and more quickly, bottlenecked by only it's community's maturity and not by corporate hesitance, I'm not believing this happy talk about "pushing".
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make install -not war
It seems that every post that points out the Novell/Microsoft deal are marked as troll or flamebait.
I know it's a hot issue and the Microsoft/Novell deal still bothers me, but anyone bringing up this issue is automatically tagged as troll. Care to explain?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
How does the Novell/Microsoft deal affect your rights? You have not signed it.
If it did affect your rights in some nefarious way, how would not using Suse counteract that?
But still, being aware to look after your rights is a good instinct. Just make sure it is based on facts not FUD. The Free Software Foundation has a list of free distributions which meet their standards. The FSF is generally the most legally conservative and ideologically pure outfit in the free software world, so if you use something they have approved you can be pretty certain of peace of mind.
A reasonable alternative is to use a distribution which keeps a clear distinction between free software and non-free. Debian is famous for this, but Fedora (which is what I use) also has a policy to include only free software (in recent releases anyway). The difference with the FSF-approved distributions lies in loadable firmware, but you may not be concerned about that.
(If you don't want to use Suse because you dislike Novell's business practices and their deal with Microsoft, that's your choice, but just say so rather than inventing stuff about 'legal risks'. Or if you do know of legal risks, please explain what they are so that people can fix the problem.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
And another Ars article says:
Mono does not seem to be just means to an end, but an end in itself.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Kids, you read too much of rabbid flames...
As I'm concerned, SUSE is good OS. Let the rest be sorted out by GPL.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I don't know what elderly people you work with, but none, I repeat, none of the people I work with have every known how to shut down or reboot Vista without me explaining.
MS has hidden the Shut Down and Reboot options under a very small, and unassuming button with a triangle on it in the very lower right of the menu. The Sleep button is the big, red button with the power symbol on it.
I know anecdotal evidence and everything; but your test fails for Vista on every user I have worked with.
I have hard time belieeving your grandma was able to install Windows and not Linux. 1) Pop in Fedora Live , hit "Install to Hard drive" 2) Open up what word processor (usually only one on a Live cd) 2b) Type letter, save as/export as PDF 3) Open up Firefox/Gmail or Thunderbird send email 4) Take picture, plug SSD into SSD reader on machine 5) Here it gets tricky, can't remember if Linux distros auto add printers... then again I can't remember Windows auto adding printers either. And why exactly does your grandma test include installing and setting up and operating system?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Your grandmother knows how to find drivers for her network card and install them? Wow. I'm impressed.
Erm...so your grandma can install an OS but can't turn the computer off?
And how the frack is grandma supposed to send an email in Word or PDF from a fresh Windows install? Did she also install Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat, or was she supposed to use Wordpad?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
You have a short memory. YaST was non-free not so long ago. I think Novell made it free software after they bought SuSE.
Well, in the days I used SUSE very extensively. And, no, SUSE never tried to hide the fact that they ship and install non-free software.
What's more, if you would dig you memory, you might recall that they pretty much from day one were stating that it is impossible to build good OS with only free software. And they were always shipping commercial software. e.g. SUSE was first Linux to include movie editing software - in the times when there was no F/LOSS alternatives. They were also shipping MP3 support - because they acquired license for that. (*)
SUSE was openly stating that they are per se not free. You can make out of SUSE free OS - yet you would loose lots of functionality, making OS non-starter in any OS comparison. And SUSE was always comparable versus Windows and Mac OS.
(*) Freely downloadable ISO image not always included all goodies of the boxed retail version.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Google is such a terrible company. They go around pretending to be the good guys by helping open source projects, promoting an open-source browser, developing an open source browser and supporting webkit, pushing standardization and inter-communication between chat clients. pushing for the use of free (as in beer) software. It clearly won't be long before we were wishing Microsoft was back and those rat-bastards at Google had never touched the web!
What license incompatibilities? There are none.
The only thing that changed after the MS/Novell deal wrt using SLED/SLES is that you'd have been protected from law suites over patents from Microsoft.
You chose to make sure that Microsoft could sue you, grats.
There were no license incompatibilities then and there aren't any now.
Why would anyone ship python 3.0 at this point when it broke backward compatibility and probably doens't work for a large number of python applications?
Time makes more converts than reason
'Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft' please explain why HP uses SLED and not say debian ? or Fedora (redhat?)
Used to be a suse user myself - then Novell came.
The GPL is time consuming remember those 235 patent infingements that ms have 'yet' to name ?
I'm not 'rabbid' just theres better distro's out there.
Novell bought SuSE and open sourced YaST.
But first they bought Ximian and open sourced the Exchange Connector for Evolution.
Damn those Novell guys for liberating the non-open source pieces of code these companies had! The community has suffered greatly because of Novell! :-)
The point of the deal was blatantly obvious: Microsoft paid Novell loads of money so that people like you will go around to places like slashdot making posts like the above to create the impression that linux is of questionable legality. Microsoft hopes that business people will get wind of your fears and therefore shy away from linux.
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