If Novell sells SuSE I would very much like to see SuSE and the Microsoft-Novell agreement end up in two unrelated corporations. That would solve SuSE's problems with the rest of the open source community.
I think that it would also be in Novell's best interest to sell SuSE unencumbered with the Microsoft-Novell agreement. Novell has already learned the hard way that SuSE encumbered with the Microsoft-Novell agreement is worth significantly less that SuSE free of the agreement.
According to the article Novell has tried to sell SuSE to RedHat and Sun with no success. I encourage Novell to keep trying. I would very much like to see SuSE freed from the Microsoft-Novell agreement.
I know that procurement laws may require international standards in some cases. Maybe it’s time to revisit those laws and instead have them relate to quality, openness, and transparency rather than historical working arrangements.
More face-saving in the comment from Alex Brown. There are some people whose name might become (and forever remain) synonymous with the desruction of ISO's reputation (Roger Frost might be one of them). It's a good thing for Martin Bryan that he retired at the right time and publicly said: "The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”". He didn't really intend for his comments to leak out of ISO, but there you go. Even discrepenabty inside ISO, acknowledged by ISO itself, was supposed to remain secret. But we deserve to know better. ⬆
