Summary: Freedom in mobile squashed by Mono and the Linux-taxing distributor (funded by Microsoft)

In a new blog post from Christine Hall she warns about this type of plug for OpenSUSE, where Jos Poortvliet tries to recruit people using MeeGo as the excuse du jour. Remember that Novell's main contribution to MeeGo was Mono applications. To quote Christine:

I have a feeling that Poortvliet is probably a decent enough sort of open source guy, but I figure he’s got a pretty serious case of denial going on. Does he realize that SLED has an indemnity agreement with Microsoft that’s only legal under the GPL because SUSE lies about their end of the bargain? Or that SUSE is like a kept lover, that Redmond regularly pours $100 million chunks of cash into the company?

So, when I hear the community development project openSUSE is opening their arms and offering MeeGo a home, I have to wonder if the suits at Attachmete, SUSE’s owners, are behind this. Then I wonder, what’s in it for them?

Maybe it’s simple and innocent. Maybe they realize their love affair with Microsoft is a public relations disaster and they’re opening up a home for orphaned open source projects as a way of building up some FOSS cred. That wouldn’t be so bad, but if that’s the motive I wouldn’t count on it lasting very long if I were involved with the MeeGo project. There’s also the possibility they have some idea of having a mobile OS that’s highly integrated with their server OS. I can see where that could have some potential value for enterprise customers down the line.

My fear, however, which may be entirely unwarranted, is that this somehow has something to do with SUSE’s close relationship with Microsoft. I have absolutely no idea what this could be, except I’m pretty sure that Windows Phone 7 would somehow be involved and that ultimately it wouldn’t be good for Android or any other open source mobile OS. In other words, I smell some sort of FUD attack in the making.

Will support for this platform too be offered by a site run by Microsoft to put a tax on Linux?

Only days ago we wrote about OpenQA because Jos, an employee of Attachmate, tried to recruit people to give their time away for free.

It's not really Jos' fault that his boss assigns him tasks like that, but with posts like these it just ought to be obvious what he is doing to remove the costs of testing OpenSUSE. The head of SUSE is quoted as touting Microsoft "interop" (or patent tax in disguise) as the key feature. Here is the summary of the new interview:

In an exclusive interview, Suse president and GM Nils Brauckmann talks about strategic partnerships, building clouds, and whether the economic downturn presents an opportunity for open source

"Strategic partnership" is a euphemism for patent deal that helps Microsoft makes money from GNU/Linux. People should avoid SUSE to get across the message that Microsoft is not entitled to make money from GNU/Linux. ⬆