Bonum Certa Men Certa

OpenSUSE in 2011

Peace of mind



Summary: Why OpenSUSE is not a project worth supporting and what it has been up to over the past week

AT THE beginning of the year OpenSUSE was made the property of Attachmate and at the end of last month it was made the vassal of Microsoft. The purpose of SUSE, which uses the "Open" as a recruitment tool for volunteers, is to spread Microsoft tax. That's why Microsoft has seeded funds in the project almost every 2 years since 2006 (at least $100,000,000 at each time, serving the interests of Microsoft shareholders as it's obliged to).



As a former SUSE fan I am saddened to see how the project was crushed. It was probably the best GNU/Linux desktop distribution at one point. Remember SLED 10? XGL?

In 2011 the news about OpenSUSE is very scarce, themes and HOWTOs aside. SUSE is often being mentioned in the context of Mono and preloads of SUSE, which we used to see in HP, are no more. At Wype, SUSE is still optional and as one source puts it (repeating the press release):

Wyse also introduces two new SUSE Linux-based thin clients and reveals integration with the Big Three hypervisors.


As we explained over the past week (e.g. in relation to Microsoft's deal in China [1, 2, 3, 4]), Microsoft uses its virtualisation deal with Novell to basically add Windows to environments which were GNU/Linux only. Microsoft does the same thing in HPC. So the purpose of SUSE is really to make Windows and Microsoft tax (on GNU/Linux) more widespread. That's why Microsoft is willing to give SUSE so much money.

Stay away from SUSE to defend software freedom. It's not about provoking or avenging, it's about doing the sensible thing, expelling Microsoft intrusion.

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