The Microsoft Patent Deal is With SUSE Now, So Boycott SUSE
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2011-08-11 13:04:13 UTC
Modified: 2011-08-12 21:39:53 UTC
SUSE is a patent trap
Summary: Reflections on the patent deal's transition from Novell to SUSE and what we should do in order to prevent Microsoft from taxing GNU/Linux
THERE are serious problems in SUSE not just because it fell deeper into Microsoft's arms (see our SUSE-Microsoft deal coverage) but also because it fails technically for some. As we showed the other day, a lot of the talented developers and managers left, putting the project/company in the hands of Microsoft-friendly people. Outside the circles of SUSE, there does not seem to be much progress as there are hardly any new releases, just security releases addressing security problems [1, 2, 3, 4].
Novell's PR team was almost entirely decimated based on the activity (or lack thereof) in the respective blogs and the scarcity of new promotional videos. There is this newly-uploaded one with Geeko in it, perhaps symbolising the company's shift to Microsoft-taxed distro as a business model.
"Over 200 of the openSUSE Members voted, with 90% in favor of the current strategy document," says the OpenSUSE new site, but did the OpenSUSE community get to vote regarding that recent deal with Microsoft? Or as Groklaw recently put it, did the community get involved in the press releases and blog posts from Novell's PR blog when it speaks on behalf of SUSE? Of course not. The control by a 'community' is merely an illusion. Now that the deal with Microsoft binds SUSE rather than Novell, we do call for a boycott of SUSE. Novell is no more. We'll close with this new autotuned video of Novell because it is quite neat and merely a remnant of a now-defunct company. ⬆
Because digital connections in third parties aren't assets; they endow another party with tremendous power over people (e.g. MElon getting to decide who can and cannot reach people or what messages to "dim down")
Narrowing down to desktops and laptops, and judging by Web requests that go through Clownflare, many people there use GNU/Linux or Google's 'bastardised' version of it (with spyware preloaded)
From what we can gather, the tram ticketing system does not use Windows; we never saw it crashing or rebooting (or showing some Windows logo) in decades, so we assume it runs some kind of Linux
