On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 10:31 AM, in message
200708311031.06423.jtd@sparc.net, jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in wrote:
On Friday 31 August 2007 07:05, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On 30-Aug-07, at 6:45 PM, Mrugesh Karnik wrote:
And anyway, do notice the fact that quite a few opensuse developers contribute a lot of good stuff.
also, for the ordinary user who just wants things to work, Suse, along with Mandriva are the two distros that really rock. Further Novell has deep roots in India and a huge support infrastructure, It,
All the strengths and they go and shoot themselves in both feet. The deal brings Novell in M$ gunsight the moment it expires in 4 yrs. Ifact proly much earlier given that gplV3 adoption is happening a lot faster and Linus who was very opposed now finding it more to his liking.
- Speculation!! - Also I would suggest you to read Clause 11( related to patents) of GPL v3 in its entirety . I am not lawyer not do I have any legal background. But it doesn't it mention something about agreements made prior to 28 March 2007.
Including closed bits in a distro makes these bits the wealest link in the reliability / maintaiability / performance chain and will reduce a distro to the weakeness of the closed code vendor. In short companies like Novell are bartering away their strength for a weakness in order to gain a very temp advantage. Infact such distros will be an order of magnitude weaker than the closed vendor. Precisely what M$ wants.
- Closed source applications are only included in the enterprise distributions ie. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server / Desktop which are any way not targeted at the home user segment. Why are they included ? Because the end customer wants the functionality and does not want to get into the mess of what is open-source and what is closed-source. They just want things to work. And FYI, any applications that have patent or license issues are not bundled with these distributions either. However, these distributions do bundle licensed software which may not be opensource ie. Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer, Flash Player, Java
- If you want a completely open-source product, look at openSUSE.
along with Redhat are the only two options government and industry can go for. No other distro offers support in India. In addition tamilnadu has just installed about 50,000 Suse computers across the state. These are facts. Live with them - no use spouting ideology - concretely what are we going to do about this?
explain the dangers to anyone who cares to listen.
- You are free to do that as is anybody else. But please provide complete information/facts instead of opinionated statements lacking in facts
Regards, Rahul