In a change of heart, Novell has ceased distributing proprietary software modules such as 3D video drivers that plug into the Linux kernel. The change came with Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10, released in July. With the move, Novell is aligning itself with the Free Software Foundation, which shuns proprietary software in general but in particular loathes proprietary modules that run as a component of the open-source Linux kernel.
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Member since:2005-11-05
As a proud member of the openSUSE community, maintaining packages in the openSUSE build service, I politely ask you to stop talking about things you don't know at all. Get a clue first.
I've used every edition of SuSE continuously since 2000, though I now keep it on a spare partition, as a back up, and use Debian instead. I think I have a pretty good idea of what I am talking about.
Please don't tell me that SuSE support has gotten better in the past couple of years from the POV of the single user, because it has not. Novell need to draw in a much larger and more involved community of users, and to do that they need to drop the control freakery and the presentation of a "community" distro that isn't. Otherwise folks might conclude that calling it OpenSuSE was something of an own goal. Just my 2 cents of course.
As for Novell being incapable of marketing mistakes ...
Member since:2006-06-28
Member since:
2006-03-17
> I suspect this is Novell just currying favour with the
> right-on vote, in other words a marketing issue really.
Wrong. Marketing-wise, this decision is a disaster because it means a regression in hardware support. Doing this step as a marketing issue would be plain stupid.
> Novell are so far behind Red Hat in the enterprise
> market - a 4 to 1 margin, I believe - they must be
> getting desperate enough to try anything.
Wrong. Doing this - which actually means, less hardware support than before - is not a desperate try and it has nothing to do with Red Hat.
OK, actually it has something to do with Red Hat: Red Hat was in a position of legal security and Novell was not. Now it is.
> a) I don't like the new name, OpenSuSE, not least
> because it isn't open at all but a closed corporate
> non-community
As a proud member of the openSUSE community, maintaining packages in the openSUSE build service, I politely ask you to stop talking about things you don't know at all. Get a clue first.
> c) the package selections have been shrinking with
> each new release.
This is not true. You have obviously never counted the packages in the tree.
After opening up the tree, there are now more packages in the Factory tree than ever before because SUSE now has the opportunity to offer all packages including those which were maintained, but unpublished in the past because they were not commercially supportable.