I would say that the recent announcement by Novell of their new found partnership with Micro$oft has left me speechless, but that would be totally correct. In fact, I am more than a little up in arms over the deal. Micro$oft has made no attempt to hide their overwhelming dislike for Linux and all that it stands for, and even after seeing all of that over the years, Novell (Suse Linux) has gone and partnered with them.
All this is part of a deal so that Micro$oft wouldn't sue Novell for patent infringement over code they claim is in the Suse distribution. Kind of deja vou if you ask me with SCO's filings and lawsuits over quite similar claims. But the difference is, those that were sued by SCO stood up to them and WON!!
It makes me wonder what Novell is so incredibly scared of. Are the claims by Micro$oft valid? Does the questionable code actually exist in the distribution? I guess we won't find out any time soon considering they are now in bed with the big bad giant of the software world. I just hope that considering this loss to the Linux community, no other distributions are weak enough to fold to this pressure.
That's right, I called this a loss. Up to right now I have been really taken with Suse as a distribution. The fact that a lot the functionality that I was looking for ( ie: cd/dvd burning, cd/dvd image creation/ripping to name a couple) simply worked right out of the box has a lot to say about a distribution. Granted, not everything worked the way it was supposed to. I have been trying to learn Apache 2.0 better so that I can get the httpd.conf file setup correctly to support cgi scripting as it seems that the file I have by default differs greatly from the file that is default on other "working" systems, like Fedora. Also the directories where things, like Apache, are installed are different from the default in the software's documentation ( unlike that of distro's like Fedora which stuck to the vendor's defaults).
Those things aside, Suse is a generally good desktop OS, but now, with the advent of Micro$oft being involved with them, I give the distro two years. Two years and it will be almost non-existent, that is if Micro$oft has its way. I don't think they would make a deal like this unless there was a lot in it for them. Ballmer is to much of a Linux hater to make a deal that was beneficial to the Linux community.
If you look at the Novell website, you will see the title "Bridging the Divide" right on the front page. That is an extremely weak bridge, possibly made of doozer material. Personally, I will not be venturing across and I don't advise anyone else to either.
Meanwhile, over at the evil giant's website, there is NOT ONE MENTION of the fact that this deal ever happened. Of all the information on their main page, the deal with Novell isn't even hinted at. So, while Novell feels the need to announce the deal to the world, Micro$oft chooses the null approach. Makes you wonder how important it really is to them.
To Mr. Ballmer and his organization I say, "Enjoy Suse, its yours now". To the rest of the Linux community and to advocates like myself I say, "Let's sew up this would and go on. Its only a scratch and a scratch never killed a movement".
At this point, I am in the process of downloading the DVD of Fedora Core 6. As for my Suse 10.1 DVD and SLED 10 discs, well, I was looking for some good cup holders.
GO LINUX!!!
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
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