RE: [MLUG] SuSE

["Ross, Matthew" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> So? The software is free as in speech, not beer.

Which, if the major repositories of the software are becoming closed shops that just write proprietary add-ins to the OS, its not going to be free in either sense.

> Well the Novell CEO said that their purchase of Ximian and 
> SuSE indicated
> their commitment long-term to open source. They said they 
> indented to keep
> major development ongoing in Nuremberg (the SuSE headquarters).

Buying a treadmill doesn't indicate my long-term commitment to weight loss. It indicates that the treadmill seemed like a good idea at the time. Purchasing open source companies just indicates that they think doing so will help their bottom line. Their long-term commitment is contractual to the full extent that it exists.

> We also shouldn't kid ourselves that Novell are dying, or 
> obsolete. Novell
> software is in use by 80% of Fortune 500 companies. It's market
> capitalisation is 20% more than RedHat at $2.8b.

Nobody said they were dying, they've just specialized themselves into a niche that has no noteriety, but, as you mentioned, happens to be in areas Linux could use a shot in the arm. Ask a non-geek sometime what Novell makes. Thats what I meant by my comment. The comment that they let good products die is true though.

> We can't moan about others not adopting Linux instead of MS, 
> then complain
> when a major company buys a Linux distro and announces that 
> it intends to
> bring Linux to a lot more enterprise servers over the coming years.

Announces != action. I can announce the end of the world, but until I have my doomsday device built, it doesn't mean much. I've not had the misfortune of losing a Novell product I particularly liked, so I'll leave it to someone else to tell their complaints. You could say I have a secondhand distrust of the company's "long term commitments". 

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