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Humour: What If OpenSUSE 10.3 Was Announced Jointly by Novell and Microsoft?

Sellout



Factual details about the new release will come on Saturday, but for amusement purposes only, here is an E-mail that I received (just... slightly... modified)

____________________________________________ The openSUSE team proudly announces the availability of openSUSE 10.3, to be renamed Enterprise Windows-compatible Linux in the next version.

We're shipping all the latest open source packages that are available after Mr. Ballmer has completed a quick inspection. As highlights, we'd like to point out the latest desktops, GNOME 2.20 and KDE 3.5.7 plus KDE 4 preview, our MP3 support with Microsoft's patent coverage (courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent) via gstreamer plug-in by Fluendo, a dual boot process (for Vista), heavily optimised and improved package management, 1-click install option for additional software (patent protection for this idea from Microsoft will last for another 4 years, but Amazon's one-click-shopping patent remains a threat), OpenOffice 2.3 (with OOXML support), XEN 3.1 and VirtualBox 1.5 (SUSE Linux-exclusive thanks to the interop lab and the joint efforts with our good friends from Redmond) and, last but not least, our 1 CD installation which provides a small but fully loaded Vista trial version. For all the news and impressive screenshots, have a look at http://news.opensuse.org/?p=400 and have a look at things to come at http://microsoft.com/products/vienna

It's available now to download at http://software.openSUSE.org, only as a x86 version (64-bit is impractical, according to our partners at Redmond and PPC is only used by rival companies) - from our mirrors and via bittorrent.

The following ISOs can be downloaded: the 1 CD open source version with an add-on CD containing proprietary software, such as WGA, Windows Media Player, XPS reader, HD viewer, Silverlight Limited Edition, RealNetworks RealPlayer, .NET clone called Mono, and Sun Java Runtime Environment. DVD ISOs for all architectures are available and contain the open source version plus proprietary add-ons. An installable Live CD will be released in October, and the Edu add-on CD [http://en.opensuse.org/Education] will show up in the same time frame. However, thanks to our recently-commissioned studies, we are told that children prefer Windows.

As usual, openSUSE 10.3 will be available in European retail channels as a boxed product. The Register reports that the price in Britain exceeds 3,000 pounds (true story). In North America, the box will be available through shopNovell [http://shop.novell.com]. Due to production lead times and disruption due to the layoffs that Novell is expecting in October 2007 boxes will start to show up on shelves and in online shops approximately on Oct 11th. Pre-orders can be placed here: http://en.opensuse.org/Buy_openSUSE

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Microsoft and the whole openSUSE community for tons of protection, coupons, attacking rival Linux distribution with FUD, testing, feedback, contributions and over all participation in helping to make openSUSE 10.3 an awesome distribution. While risking missing out some important contributors, we'd like to spotlight some community members (some of whom are paid) for their outstanding work:

- Ballmer for Producing FUD against rival Linuxes - Hilf for relentless 'patent terrorism' - Francis for Sneak Peeks [http://news.opensuse.org/?cat=17] - Beineri for his Quickies [http://news.opensuse.org/?cat=12] - Benji for the 1-click install [http://news.opensuse.org/?p=133] - Pascal and sPIN for community help [http://help.opensuse.org/] - All the community translators - http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Localization_Teams Our top 3 bug reporters for openSUSE 10.3 - Andreas Hanke - David Binderman - Casual J. Programmer

Have a lot of fun!

Christoph, Coolo, Michael ____________________________________________

Yes, it's a joke, as was stated above.

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