Novell's Management Hurts Opensuse's Image (Corrected)
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2007-07-08 08:31:13 UTC
- Modified: 2007-07-13 00:42:12 UTC
Occasionally I come across Opensuse reviews where non-technical aspects of the product affect the overall impression. Linspire and Xandros now suffer from the same problem. It's an image problem. Novell signed a deal with its aggressive, long-time rival. It also made mockery of Free software in the process.
Shane and I have said dozens of times before that at BoycottNovell.com we try to appreciate the developers' work (Opensuse). We only blame the executives for taking the money and allowing their developers to get a bad name. I was among those in the opensuse community at the time. I felt betrayed.
To repeat old facts, the developers were not part of the this decision, with the exception of a few prominent ones such as Miguel de Icaza, who is a VP. It was all done secretly. Jeremy Allison knew about it and he protested against the sneaky, 90th-minute inclusion of patent elements [
update: see
clarifications/corrections]. These elements were
not part of the original deal, which had been negotiated for months.
As for Nat Friedman and de Icaza, their story remains a mystery. It is believed that they are among the drivers in this deal. As you may already know, de Icaza has strong ties with Port 25 and the 'Microsoft culture' (he even had a job interview there). It is my opinion that he does not necessarily represent Opensuse developers
as a whole, although he just might. Not all of them care for Mono (.NET), which is a patents-encumbered development technology and a controversial framework to many Linux distributors other than Novell. The validity of these patents is a different matter altogether, but only yesterday,
Slashdot reminded us why it's
hard to fight for sanity.
Comments
Miguel de Icaza
2007-07-08 18:12:10
I learned about the deal the same day that Jeremy Allison learned about it. At the time all of us felt that it was not great, but it was not terrible. Jeremy's position on this would changed in the following days, when the deal went public and as the Samba folks took a stronger position.
Your regular attacks on Mono on every forum in the world are tiresome but at least they reflect your opinion. You have now crossed into false accusations without having any evidence to support them, and that is just defamatory. You need to make a public retraction.
Miguel.
Roy Schestowitz
2007-07-09 02:01:01
Can you say with confidence that Red Hat, for example, can change its stance on Mono and include such applications in their distribution?
shane coyle
2007-07-10 15:17:23
It's never been more clear to me that Novell's management made a "unilateral" decision to join forces with Microsoft, regardless of what the "grunts" wanted or advised.
gpl1
2007-07-10 18:46:31
I've heard that several times on Groklaw, too in regards to thoughts and facts on Novell and Microsoft, so thanks for outing yourself Miguel. You might want to point out why that is, when Microsoft memos themselves pointed out a few years ago that many licenses for C# and .NET are non-commercial only. You really are heading into SCO "gagging" territory here.
Ah court documents, the bane if MS the only thing that stops Microsoft from crushing everyone full stop.
I also want to thank Shayne and Roy for this wonderful site.
snowboard
2007-08-21 13:53:16