lol teh blatant shakedown
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Nov 05, 2006 8:18 AM EDT |
"Such talks would be a good idea, Ballmer suggested, since now only Novell's SUSE Linux customers are the only Linux vendors that have any assurance that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement." Good $deity, these greedy sods are so transparent. |
| mdl Nov 05, 2006 10:43 AM EDT |
Once "other Linux vendors" see the reaction to Novell's move, I doubt anyone will want to follow them off the cliff. The Linux community is many things, but lemmings they are not. |
| dinotrac Nov 05, 2006 11:41 AM EDT |
> but lemmings they are not. I dunno. I see an awful lot of "Let's drop SuSE like a hot potato.." Sounds a mite lemming-like to me. |
| galeru Nov 05, 2006 12:45 PM EDT |
That's really more of a knee-jerk reaction than lemmings following each other off cliffs. I would agree with you, though, if people don't like it, they can feel free to go to another distro, and that is their perogative. I wonder how that will turn out in the long run though. Will the short term drop of people using SuSE be outweighed in the long run by people who feel the Microsoft partnership make it better? I wait with bated breath. |
| dinotrac Nov 05, 2006 1:19 PM EDT |
>That's really more of a knee-jerk reaction than lemmings following each other off cliffs. All in how you look at it, I suppose. If people troop off to other distros just because Novell has reached a deal with Microsoft -- one that doesn't seem to require taking free software users prisoner or setting fire to penguin habitats -- the only difference becomes the nature of the landing spot. |
| salparadise Nov 06, 2006 12:00 AM EDT |
For some people, the mere fact that Novell has done a deal with Microsoft is enough to make them not want to use SuSE ever again. This is a legitimate response. |
| dcparris Nov 06, 2006 6:31 AM EDT |
Well, a deal with Microsoft, in and of itself, should not be the cause of changing distros. If I could sign a deal with Microsoft that made them support ODF further (something I think Novell should have done), then I would see that as a good thing. So, just dealing with MS (not likely on my part) is not necessarily evil, even if it ain't the smartest move a company could make. So far, though, I am not very keen on this particular deal. It is also ironic that I had just replaced SUSE 10.0 with Ichthux on my primary box (when my hard drive recently crashed). |
| salparadise Nov 06, 2006 6:37 AM EDT |
...as for me, I'm having fun with Fedora Core 6. |
| helios Nov 06, 2006 7:02 PM EDT |
Sal, we just "rigged" FC6 into our terminal server at work and whoooooo-boy, are we havin' fun now or what? There are some rough spots, but overall, I am happy with the Modified K12LSTP with FC6. Never thought I would bother with a RH clone, but for the thin clients and the handful of stand-alones that my boss trusts with sudo rights and a hard drive, I gotta say I am impressed. Not with the "extra modifications" for the play toys, but overall...it's looking good. And besides, MP3 protocol IS mission critical. At least I got away with selling it that way. Don. maybe it is the elitist snob in me, but the simple idea of Microsoft having ANYTHING to do with Linux makes my skin crawl and causes me to do a mental inventory on how much soap we have in the house. Isn't a prOn site in the world that made me feel as sleazy as the idea of MS within the Linux realm. Just "not using" the Novell offering isn't enough. I believe when the entire community digests this handshake, the gates of Hell will shake. h |
| jdixon Nov 06, 2006 7:38 PM EDT |
> had just replaced SUSE 10.0 with Ichthux on my primary box > as for me, I'm having fun with Fedora Core 6. Now you see folks, if you just stick to Slackware, you don't have all of these problems. :) |
| tuxchick Nov 06, 2006 7:48 PM EDT |
Computers are the devil. I don't believe in them. |
| salparadise Nov 06, 2006 9:52 PM EDT |
Perhaps not the devil, I detect no sulphuric smell and have never seen any goats in the neighbourhood. But magic? Aye magic, and a strange one at that. Chord of mouse and eye of cam. CPU, hard drive and RAM Mix it up, now what you got? An expensive box that runs too hot. |
| dcparris Nov 06, 2006 10:01 PM EDT |
Helios, I don't want to pull up my tent stakes just because Novell signed a deal. That's the thing. My move was ironic, not intentional. The GPL will be fine. That said, Two things still bother me about the Novell-MS deal: MS' office formats gain credibility, thanks to Novell, a company that claims to support ODF Any way you slice it, MS is going to be flashing the patent saber in our faces every chance they get, even if it is just FUD The patent thing I can almost skip over - it's basically a load of crap. I'm actually more concerned about ODF. Novell - a company claiming to support ODF - is seeking to support MOOX? I'm on the verge of calling them back-stabbers. Supporting MOOX gives it legitimacy, while simultaneously throwing resources that could be used for ODF at MOOX. Ughhh!!! |
| dcparris Nov 06, 2006 10:03 PM EDT |
> ...have never seen any goats in the neighbourhood. I could have sworn there were some goats running loose when my brother took me to his office on the MS campus in Seattle. Maybe it was just the wine that hasn't been served since '69. |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 06, 2006 10:19 PM EDT |
Quoting:Novell - a company claiming to support ODF - is seeking to support MOOX? I can see where Novell is coming from. As a corporate user, would you use OpenOffice.org if you could not read/write MS-Word 97/2000/XP documents? Office 2007 is coming and people will save their files as Office Open XML. Anyway, I wish them luck. The Office XML reader is pretty much impossible to create for a non-Win platform thanks to it's ties to various MS proprietry standards/API's. And even *if* they manage to pull it off, it'll never make it into the official OOo builds. The total effect will be quite small. |
| salparadise Nov 07, 2006 1:05 AM EDT |
But Novell have completely undermined the argument for .odf.
Had they stuck with odf (Novell have been on the ECMA board for a while) then "we" could have sent a unified message "odf or clear off".
Now, Microsoft are in a much stronger position to say "why can't the other distros be like Novell and support "open"xml? Amazing, how suddenly everything Microsoft does manages to have the word "open" attached to it even though they know next to nothing of the word. Talk about abuse of language - added to the list along with "colateral damage, virtually fat free, now even whiter" and so on. Orwellian double-speak at its finest - "we love Linux, we have always loved Linux". If they put half as much effort into the code as they have into manipulating the market place and the language used therein... This is quite apart from the implicit accusation that "all other distros are stuffed full of Microsoft patented technology but only Novell users can feel safe". Just wondering why Novell didn't say, publicly and loudly, "oh we're all using your patented technology are we? OK, let's see the proof of where and when?" |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 07, 2006 4:06 AM EDT |
Quoting:But Novell have completely undermined the argument for .odf. Or not. If - after months/years of trying, millions of dollars and even MS temselves working on it - they utterly fail to get Office Open XML working half-way decent on a non Win32 plaform, what does that say about Office Open XML? |
| dcparris Nov 07, 2006 8:34 AM EDT |
That's a good point sander. Thanks for helping me see it a little differently. Still, I remain concerned about the issue, since it could turn out a number of different ways. |
| dinotrac Nov 07, 2006 9:34 AM EDT |
>hat does that say about Office Open XML? Says it's not very open. Real XML -- as opposed to popping encoded binary crud into xml elements -- is designed -- for easy transformation. If there is a real problem going back and forth between Open XML and any other XMl format, it means that Open XML isn't very open and isn't very XML. |
| dcparris Nov 07, 2006 12:39 PM EDT |
:-) |
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