"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."
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Member since:2007-03-05
Member since:2006-12-23
Member since:2005-07-24
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Indeed, this wouldn't have happened without MS-Novell deal.
So how many users stopped using SuSe as a protest.
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Well, it probably would have happened. MS decided that the time was right and moved forward. At worst, Novell aided and abetted.
While I don't use any of the Suse family of distros, as they have never been my cup of tea, I would remind everyone that OpenSuse and Suse are not one and the same thing. (I don't mean to imply that osgeek did. I'm just aiming to disambiguate.)
I would also remind you that this is likely a multi-pronged strategy on MS's part. Don't focus so much upon the FUD part that you forget about the "divide the community and conquer it" part.
That doesn't mean I think we should all trust Novell implicitly. But let's not let Microsoft play us like marionettes, either.
Edited 2007-05-14 17:24
Member since:
2006-12-16
And people wonder why Novell did a deal with Microsoft...these bastards are swapping money to control Linux. Kill the competition.
Granted - the vast majority of Microsoft's patents are bogus, granted by a USPTO that couldn't tell its a$$ from its face, but that doesn't change the problem.
I really hope this makes IBM retaliate with its own patent warchest, screwing Microsoft in the process. I'd love to see a patent war, because it's the only way to show how BAD they are. They do not cause innovation, they stifle innovation, and the only way to fix the problem is to make all software patents invalid and ban them from EVER being applied again.
Dave