Novell and Microsoft to be partners?

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 3:18 pm

Souffle is overrated. Both litterally and metaphorically.

TankCatNinjaFish · Post by **TankCatNinjaFish** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 3:18 pm

what? did you think Novell was commited to open source? here's whats on Novell's checklist:
-Fire Jeremy Allison, Miguel de Icaza, and everyone else creating a competing product.
-Work with microsoft to marginalize redhat.
-Sell whats left of Novell to Microsoft.

IceMan · Post by **IceMan** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 3:27 pm

"Resistance is futile — you will be assimilated."

The End !

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 5:17 pm

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:what? did you think Novell was commited to open source? here's whats on Novell's checklist:
-Fire Jeremy Allison, Miguel de Icaza, and everyone else creating a competing product.
-Work with microsoft to marginalize redhat.
-Sell whats left of Novell to Microsoft.

If that was the case, I think a lot of the SUSE guys would quit, I know they believe in competition, as well do Red Hat.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 6:46 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:If that was the case, I think a lot of the SUSE guys would quit, I know they believe in competition, as well do Red Hat.

I wonder how many people employed by Novell and writing code for SuSE were surprised by this deal. It must have blind-sided some of their staff (if not most).

TankCatNinjaFish · Post by **TankCatNinjaFish** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 8:51 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:
TankCatNinjaFish wrote:what? did you think Novell was commited to open source? here's whats on Novell's checklist:
-Fire Jeremy Allison, Miguel de Icaza, and everyone else creating a competing product.
-Work with microsoft to marginalize redhat.
-Sell whats left of Novell to Microsoft.
If that was the case, I think a lot of the SUSE guys would quit, I know they believe in competition, as well do Red Hat.

Maybe Suse developers at Novell will jump ship and go back to contributing to Suse for free, b/c they believe in competition and the viability of open source. Or maybe they have families to support and will do anything to hang on to their jobs.

I can see it now: ClosedSuse 11, with Internet explorer, outlook express, and office! all for low price of $279. And Tsuroerusu will still be a fan of it!

IceMan · Post by **IceMan** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 9:42 pm

Hey!

please keep Troels out of this discussion!

that's not fair !

i guess he is just as stunned by the the decision made by Novell, as most of us were !

that said, the next "contribution" I'm going to make will go to Red Hat and Mandriva (i've allready purchased Mandriva powerpack

!

just happy that we do not have software patents here in Europe !

Bring em' on

!

MS Linux certified ............

( doesn't sound right ......!)

/iceman (Lars)

PS: Troels skal du med på Linuxforum 2007 ?

http://www.linuxforum.dk/2007/

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 11:14 pm

IceMan wrote:that said, the next "contribution" I'm going to make will go to Red Hat and Mandriva (i've allready purchased Mandriva powerpack !

I'm glad Mandriva is working out for you, IceMan. I know your support for the distro. will be appreciated.

Just finished installing Mandriva 2007 (One) on a half dozen PCs today. Everyone seemed very impressed with it and it worked just wonderfully on all of them. I also gave away about 30 copies of the 2007 One CDs Mandriva sent me earlier last week.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 7:41 am

Judland wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:If that was the case, I think a lot of the SUSE guys would quit, I know they believe in competition, as well do Red Hat.
I wonder how many people employed by Novell and writing code for SuSE were surprised by this deal. It must have blind-sided some of their staff (if not most).

Miguel de Icaza wrote on his blog that he only found out a week before the announcement, and judging by that, and by their reactions on the openSUSE mailing lists, I'd say the same is the case with the SUSE guys in Germany. Remember Miguel de Icaza has a pretty high position at Novell (Which, by the way, I think had something to do with Novell going with GNOME as their default desktop environment).

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:Maybe Suse developers at Novell will jump ship and go back to contributing to Suse for free, b/c they believe in competition and the viability of open source. Or maybe they have families to support and will do anything to hang on to their jobs.

Well, the founder of SUSE, Hubert Mantel, left either the day, or a few days after, I don't remember exactly, Novell basically said "We're dumping KDE", and then they got yelled and said "GNOME is gonna be default, but KDE is still very much supported".

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:I can see it now: ClosedSuse 11, with Internet explorer, outlook express, and office! all for low price of $279. And Tsuroerusu will still be a fan of it!

You obviously don't know my opinions on proprietary software and closed, de-facto standards.

First of all, I HATE NON-OPEN FORMATS AND NON-OPEN, MOST LIKELY DE-FACTO, STANDARDS.

Also, I don't like the idea of proprietary software, >I< think it's bad of society because it results it monopolies and software patents and it's also very bad for security because only the ones who has the source code can audit it, and you have absolutely no idea what proprietary software is doing on your system. If NVIDIA wanted to, I'm sure they could include a rootkit in their driver and make it phone home about stuff, and nobody would know about it until somebody reverse engineered the driver, which by the way violates NVIDIA's EULA.

I am big fan of SUSE, because overall I think it's a good quality distribution (That package manager change though, was a disaster), I think YaST is really awesome system for configuring the system, and boy does it do a damn good job of setting up X correctly. Another reason I like SUSE is because of the phenomenal KDE support, sure you can easily install KDE on pretty much any distribution, but try installing both Fedora Core 6 and SUSE Linux 10.1 with KDE, and use both for a day (Two days in total), and tell me which one you liked the most, I'm confident you're gonna say SUSE. I am aware that Red Hat's focus is GNOME, but it's just an example, also I think Kubuntu is KRAP! (Wanna flame me now? Go ahead and PM me

)

I am in no way a zealot of SUSE, nor do I drink a SUSE koolaid, in fact, right now I run more OpenBSD than I run Linux, which is quite funny (I run Linux on my main PC, I run OpenBSD on my web server and Mac mini).

IceMan wrote:i guess he is just as stunned by the the decision made by Novell, as most of us were !

What stuns me is that it seems Novell has just forgotten the GPL completely, it clearly says that if the people you distribute the software to, can't redistribute it freely, YOU may not distribute the software.

IceMan wrote:that said, the next "contribution" I'm going to make will go to Red Hat and Mandriva (i've allready purchased Mandriva powerpack !

You can be damn sure that that until Novell cancels this deal with Microsoft, I am not buying anymore SUSE retail boxes, because I don't want my money to be reinvested into suing people making or distributing free software or trying to get software patents in Europe.

IceMan wrote:just happy that we do not have software patents here in Europe !

Don't take that for granted, it was only because people fought against it that we do not have it today, and we need to be on our guard, because unless the patent law of Europe one day says "Computer software cannot be patented", they (Microsoft, Sony ...) are gonna continue trying to make software patentable.

IceMan wrote:PS: Troels skal du med på Linuxforum 2007 ?

http://www.linuxforum.dk/2007/

Nej, desværre, det er simpelthen for langt væk, jeg bor i Silkeborg, og København er ihvertfald 400 km væk.

Shagbag · Post by **Shagbag** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 8:05 am

I don't get it. Why did M$ do a deal with Novell instead of simply suing them? It strikes me that M$'s veiled threat (join us or else) is nothing more than the emperor admiring his new clothes: 'look at my patents - aren't they powerful?'

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 8:09 am

Shagbag wrote:I don't get it. Why did M$ do a deal with Novell instead of simply suing them? It strikes me that M$'s veiled threat (join us or else) is nothing more than the emperor admiring his new clothes: 'look at my patents - aren't they powerful?'

Well, if Microsoft sues Novell over say the FAT patent, then Novell will just counter sue Microsoft over something from it's patent portfolio, same deal if they sued IBM or HP.

Shagbag · Post by **Shagbag** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 8:37 am

So, if I understand, the implication of what you're saying is that M$'s agreement not to sue gives little (if any) additional protection to SuSE users, ie. they already had enough protection before the M$-Novell agreement.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 9:43 am

Shagbag wrote:So, if I understand, the implication of what you're saying is that M$'s agreement not to sue gives little (if any) additional protection to SuSE users, ie. they already had enough protection before the M$-Novell agreement.

In theory yes, however Microsoft could sue individual users if they wanted to, but if they sued Novell, Novell would just take a patent regarding some networking stuff they have in Netware and counter sue Microsoft.

This is of course not enough for CTOs and big businesses that might use Linux, which is why Novell is doing what they do, although I think it's a stupid thing they're doing, very disappointed in them, instead of just say "yeah we need to find a solution" and do some shit, they should fucking fight Microsoft's patents.

TankCatNinjaFish · Post by **TankCatNinjaFish** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 3:36 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:I am in no way a zealot of SUSE.

Sure, and Kim Jong Il is actually a nice guy.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sun Nov 05, 2006 3:49 pm

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:I am in no way a zealot of SUSE.
Sure, and Kim Jong Il is actually a nice guy.

You can believe my words or not, I really do not care, because I am honest with myself and I know that I speak the truth, whether others believe is not really something I care about in this case.