Update: as pointed out in the discussion in the comments, there were some misunderstandings and corrections/clarifications have been made since the original post was published.
Macbook owner is ‘leaving’ GNU/Linux, but did he ever come to GNU/Linux?
Summary: A protest against GNU/Linux comes from an unexpected place — someone who already bought an Apple Mac and then decided to try GNU/Linux on it
INCREASINGLY, Apple becomes a problem which directly harms software freedom. “[A]pple is attacking Linux AGAIN,” said to us someone this afternoon, “and, they’re using kdeplanet again… there’s only rhetoric and guy is deleting non apple friendly comments… there’s pure FUD…”
“To suggest that KDE is hard to use because of versatility is not correct based on these experiences. It’s more of a stigma.”Interestingly enough, the page appears to have just been deleted (it worked earlier and the front page still has the content). Could backlash have caused it? It starts by saying “I originally bought a Macbook to use as a nice Linux laptop and for some iPhone and Qt OSX development.” The funny thing is that this person bought an overpriced Mac and then said he was “Moving to OSX” (which is what’s already installed on the computer to begin with).
Earlier this week I spent hours installing PCLinuxOS (with KDE 4.4) for some other people and they found it very simply to use, even as former XP users with no GNU/Linux experience at all. No guidance was needed. To suggest that KDE is hard to use because of versatility is not correct based on these experiences. It’s more of a stigma. █
Summary: A glimpse at the latest news from Nokia, VMware, Novell, and SCO
MeeGo is at stake when a Microsoft president becomes Nokia’s CEO [1, 2, 3, 4]. Nokia is crucial to the survival and thriving of Free software projects like Qt (the very essence of a lot of KDE) and also MeeGo, which is co-developed with Intel (a successor to Moblin, which was once managed by the Linux Foundation too). “Nokia silent on MeeGo” says this new forum thread which worries the person who mentioned it earlier:
It sounds like Nokia has something cooking in the background, or they are totally clueless. I am not sure which, but I guess we will find out soon enough.
[...]
Hopefully they have something going on. With their ownership of Trolltech and Qt, the same toolkit used to create KDE, Nokia has the ability to define and influence development tools, which they can use across Symbian, Meego, and any other platforms they choose to support.
If Nokia screws up with MeeGo and with Qt, then surely some people will point the finger at the company’s new CEO from Microsoft.
Jos Poortvliet from KDE and OpenSUSE (OpenSUSE is a proponent and key participant in KDE) may soon work for several ex-Microsoft executives, who are now running VMware and want to buy SUSE. Poortvliet is still trying to determine how to best deal with the community he was assigned to manage. Would volunteers work for VMware like they worked for Novell? Anyway, from Poortvliet’s latest post:
Your strategy team has been working hard, as promised, to incorporate the comments you have all given over the last few months into a new document. That document aims to describe where openSUSE stands right now, what users we target, what we are doing. Who we are has been covered pretty decently in the current community statement and now we would like to present you with what users we target.
I can guarantee any of my sources inside Novell cannot talk about anything one way or the other, but as soon as I can find some answers to the question “What does this mean for openSUSE?” I will be sure to report back.
“One might say that VMware has been causing a brain drain and a mindshare drain in F/OSS ever since it was taken over by former Microsoft staff.”OpenSUSE is rightly called “a distro that matters” in this new post, but its developers should fork to save it from VMware. Just look at what VMware did with Zimbra. It’s almost unheard of after the acquisition because VMware is a proprietary software company with even less commitment than Novell to “open source”. One might say that VMware has been causing a brain drain and a mindshare drain in F/OSS ever since it was taken over by former Microsoft staff.
1. Fending off Red Hat: No doubt, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst plans to attack VMware. The strategy involves Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Within the halls of VMware, there is some concern about RHEV, which is based on the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Whitehurst believes RHEL and RHEV can eventually topple VMware the way Linux toppled the traditional Unix market. But it’s going to take time for Red Hat to strengthen RHEV with management tools that match VMware.
Instead of allowing RHEV to gain some momentum, VMware could use SUSE Linux to launch a preemptive strike and attack Red Hat’s core Linux business.
People have been saying that VMware would attack Red Hat for quite some time. Here is the summary from Slashdot along with a very long discussion:
minutetraders writes “According to the Wall Street Journal, VMware is attempting to acquire Novell’s SUSE Linux operating system business. This move would give VMware a full stack of enterprise software and allow it to establish itself as a full-blown infrastructure and software vendor in direct competition with Red Hat.”
Yes, it’s Red Hat again. Should SUSE not try to replace Windows instead? How much of a role do the roots of VMware’s management in Microsoft play here? Groklaw once suggested that confrontations between VMware and Microsoft are just staged. Right now Groklaw has this hypothesis about the UNIX virtual 'products' sale by SCO (also covered by The H right now):
As you have witnessed in the past decade as SCO has sued one customer after another, ensuring continued customer viability has always been at the top of SCO’s bucket list and close to its noble heart. My question is, might the timing of all this be connected with the rumored sale of Novell? Not to be cynical, but with SCO, I always assume there will be vultures.
It seems not impossible that former Microsoft executives in Nokia and in VMware help suck the core of F/OSS out of the F/OSS world. It’s just a theory and it will be tested over time. █
“Pamela Jones [...] has told Infoworld that Microsoft will be the next SCO Group”
openSUSE is far more conservative when it comes to upgrading packages in the stable release. Making it a much more stable platform. So, that means you’re always a bit behind and you can’t have the latest and greatest? No! openSUSE users CAN have their cake and eat it too. Thanks to the Build Service, newer versions of enduser applications and libraries can be entirely build against the stable distribution, lowering the number of packages you need to pull in and thus increasing stability.
To a certain extent, Poortvliet is responsible for marketing KDE but his paymaster urges him to market OpenSUSE. How can objectiveness be maintained under such pressures? Can one consolidate two roles without a conflict of interest?
Historically, Novell has been good at marketing, not necessarily at execution (not in recent years anyway, as it suffered a brain drain). Some years ago Novell made commercials for GNU/Linux, but ever since it signed a deal with Microsoft there has been almost nothing of this kind. Even right now, the videos produced by Novell promote Novell Teaming (proprietary) and user “Novelldemo” uploaded many Novell Pulse videos this month, starting with this one. Pulse is also proprietary. It has been a long time since Novell produced anything promotional about Free/open source software. User “Novell” in YouTube uploaded 6 success stories at the beginning of this month [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (there is another one about Novell’s booth at VMworld 2010), but that too has nothing to do with software freedom.
It sure seemed like several years ago KDE rebuilt and rewrote the site so as to introduce KDE as “Free software” (as in freedom, not open source). It would be a shame if Novell’s involvement in KDE changed that. KDE is already being used to promote OpenSUSE (e.g. the live CD). █
Summary: Software which makes GNU/Linux and Free software developers more accessible to Microsoft continues to be developed at Novell
WE occasionally hear about Mono being further developed but rarely about Moon Lie (Moonlight). Moon Lie is still being developed a little, based on this new post about Mono Accessibility 2.1. It is said that for KDE there are benefits in Mono Accessibility too:
Mono Accessibility 2.1 Released
[..]
A huge benefit of this work is that kde will be able to use it without pulling in a bunch of gnome dependencies allowing for a clean desktop independent accessibility infrastructure.
Mono dependencies continue to pose a risk to users and developers, who are simply giving Microsoft too much control over the API of choice. With promotion of Gnome-don’t (Mono) comes a certain liability and while it’s not constructive to ban such programs, shipping them by default (as some distributions do) is helpful to Microsoft, which is suing GNU/Linux and harming its adoption in all sorts of nefarious ways. █
he following new article names Samsung, HTC, and LG as “makers of Android-based smartphones,” but it doesn’t say that these are the main three which pay Microsoft for Android (not Motorola and Sony Ericsson for example). To quote:
Samsung, HTC, LG and other makers of Android-based smartphones keep highlighting the fact that there is a vast sea of free applications written for Android that are available to their consumers now.
How much of the Linux penetration was affected when Microsoft came out with ‘baseless’ accusations that Linux infringes on its patents (I did a long story back then for LINUX For You magazine). Microsoft never showed the numbers. All they got was to ‘force’ some Linux companies to sign cross licensing deal with them and extort some money from Linux.
Summary: Reminder that the rumour about Canonical’s interest in OpenSUSE came as a word through the grapevine, not a speculation
LAST week we shared a rumour we had heard about Canonical having an interest in buying OpenSUSE. In one of the IRC channels I’ve asked Jono Bacon (from Canonical) if they could deny this rumour, which is not ours. Jono did not deny it, but he said he had not heard about it, either. As for OpenSUSE, its community manager told me that it would not work well for a community, but he did not deny the possibility, either (no party has yet denied it).
There is a new article about the subject and while I agree with Brian that there is a lot of overlap (redundancy) between OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, I was not attempting to explain the practical rationality of it, just to pass on what I had learned. If at some point it crossed Mark Shuttleworth’s mind, then maybe he inquired now that Novell is looking for a buyer, quite likely a buyer of parts of the company. It is very diverse in its portfolio, very much like Sun, so finding a suitable acquirer that can leave all projects alive and also pass antitrust scrutiny is hard. Here is what Brian wrote:
There’s a rumor running around that Canonical, for reasons that I have yet to fathom, is supposedly interested in buying openSUSE, the community distribution project that is currently maintained and staffed by Novell.
Now, it’s important right from the get-go to understand that the primary source of this rumor is Roy Schestowitz, blogger-manager of TechRights.org–a site that until recently was known as Boycott Novell.
I think it’s safe to say that Schestowitz has negative bias when it comes to reporting about Novell and openSUSE. Boycott Novell was started as a protest site after Novell’s sales and marketing agreement with Microsoft was announced–the same deal that infamously included patent protection from Microsoft for Novell customers. Schestowitz has not been shy about his contempt for Novell, and has even come after me as a Novell sympathizer.
He is an OpenSUSE user and in some posts earlier this year he did give the impression of not having any real problem with Novell. “Sympathiser” is not a negative word by the way (it probably depends on how it’s said, but text has no tone).
If Canonical bought OpenSUSE, it would probably be good news for the distribution. Here is a new article about the crown jewel of SUSE:
Although I love Yast and its graphical incarnation, I am yet to see innovations in the areas of simplicity and also with being current.
OpenSUSE 11.3, the best binary KDE distribution or best KDE distribution?
[...]
Interestingly, OpenSUSE 11.3 was released not so long ago and the performance is very nippy. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do.
My utter disappointment with OpenSUSE 11.2 (it was very sluggish) is what made me try out Gentoo.
Funnily enough, OpenSUSE 11.3 has changed some of my thoughts about Gentoo.
It is possible that Novell will also carry on with Wave where Google left it off. Not everything which Novell does is bad and especially when it comes to OpenSUSE, there is great importance to this project because it helps GNU/Linux as a whole. █
Summary: Canonical employee is claimed to have blurted out something about Canonical buying OpenSUSE from Novell
A SOURCE of ours, who claims to have spoken with a Canonical developer, said that Canonical might be considering an OpenSUSE acquisition (Novell is still up for sale, and selling in pieces is a possibility). This rumour did get some responses but no other source has yet been able to verify. Has anybody else heard something similar? Mark Shuttleworth was looking to hire SUSE developers about four years ago.
I’d be willing to write such a proposal (yes, short notice, I know) if ppl think we should have it. I’m NOT saying here that that’s the direction we, as in openSUSE, should choose – personally I like the poweruser proposal as well as the developer proposal. Oh and the cloudy one as well… Besides, I’ve been involved only so short, my vote doesn’t count as I’m not even an openSUSE Member right now. So the openSUSE community should vote – not me. I’m just here to help!
I guess most people who discussed with me there knew already and Michael already let the cat out of the bag: I’ve joined Novell, to work on SUSE MeeGo.
About two weeks ago, the openSUSE Project released version 11.3 of its popular Linux distribution, and after putting it off for quite a while, I decided to give the latest version a download and see what SUSE has been up to. After all, the last time I took a serious look at SUSE (over four years ago!), it still went by “SuSE”… yes, it’s been quite a while. So far, my initial impressions of the latest version are quite good.
Novell claims to have made its SUSE business profitable a couple of quarters ago. Is it true that it considers selling it now? We hope that someone else has heard something through the grapevine. Novell is super-silent these days as it quietly negotiates with bidders. █
