[Discuss] MS and Novell

[Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert]

Exactly ... so how does neutering the FUD by SCO, being voted the best desktop distro by LinuxWorld and opening some new and easy business for mid-sized Linux deployments equate to pissing off the community?

RedHat pissed off the community with their change in license, all that happened is that they became the defacto standard for BC Government.  JBOSS pissed off the community by threatening to sue the Apache Group, until like SCO, it was proved that their examples of stollen code, were actually Apache Licensed code used by JBOSS.  So JBOSS in turn made millions for its founders, that made all those legal wranglings.

So ... I see it as marketing and what you can make people believe, that don't really have the opportunity to really know what's going on and how to try and move on from your supposed issues.

Novell/SuSe has kept all of their promises that they have made to me (or at least to the audience I was in) by keeping their free distro in sync with their pay-for distro.  By adding in XEN, even when RedHat said it wasn't ready to use unless you wanted to use the 'extra' pay-for version.

So I guess it's just opinion ... and mine is that I'll support those that support access to the same distro that they provide under paid support and those that place their funds to advance the stance for the Linux community (UNIX license owner, Exchange replacement servers, etc.)

Cheers,  It's been a good debate!
Thor HW


-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at vlug.org on behalf of Alan W. Irwin
Sent: Wed 11/8/2006 6:17 PM
To: discuss at vlug.org
Subject: RE: [Discuss] MS and Novell
 
On 2006-11-08 10:50-0800 Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert wrote:

> SuSe, as a Linux distro can't be compared to SCO, so the FUD is
un-warranted, unless you own RedHat stock *g*.

Well, you are incorrect about my supposed RedHat stock and also you should
call what I said HUD, not FUD. :-)

I have no fear, but I certainly do admit to honest uncertainty and doubt
about Novell's future in the Linux world.  Here's the fundamental reasons.
The most viable business models for commercial Linux distributions boil down
to paid support.  That is pretty low-margin business with competition from
lots of free Linux support that is available so it requires constant effort
to keep that business model profitable. Furthermore, by its very nature,
Linux is cooperative so Linux developers hired by Novell have to remain on
good terms with other Linux developers. Finally, a lot of new open-source
business depends on word-of-mouth advertising.  Under these delicate
business conditions it does not seem like a good tactic to me to piss off
the Linux community.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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