"Last month, Novell decided to push the limits of developer empowerment and perform an elaborate experiment in innovation by liberating the company's entire Linux engineering team for one full week of free hacking. During Novell Hack Week, hundreds of skilled developers employed by Novell at various facilities around the world worked together on open-source projects of their choice. Driven by creativity and passion instead of deadlines, instructions, and executive decisions, Novell's best and brightest created impressive new software and added innovative improvements to existing programs."
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Member since:2005-07-08
I can't stand people who dismiss good ideas simply because they come from someone they don't like. The free software community will naturally select the most promising and successful technologies regardless of who invented them. That's the foundation of meritocracy.
Novell has made some dumb and disastrous decisions. But supporting the development of a free software implementation of a well-designed high-level runtime environment is not one of them. Practical cross-platform compatibility may not be achievable without Microsoft's cooperation. But even so, advanced runtime environments are essential to the technical evolution of free software. It's a logical extension of a broad strategy of powerful abstractions that also includes virtualization technologies.
Maybe Java is the better way to go, especially if the free software community can enhance its dynamic language support. Maybe Parrot can emerge from the Perl project as a promising cross-language runtime. But at this moment, most unbiased experts would agree that the CLR/DLR is most advanced high-level runtime. In the spirit of free software, let's allow the best solution to emerge on its technical and practical merits.
Member since:2006-09-19
Member since:2005-07-06
You're absolutely correct. However, the hack week wasn't an act of altruism for the community, it was an act of altruism for Novell's engineers by Novell. While I agree with your comment out of context, within context it's irrelevant to the topic.
Member since:2005-11-02
NO COMPANY DOES ALTRUISTIC THINGS.. EVER! If you believe for a second that Novell did anything out of good heart, you are more naive than my mom (and that's a big naive there)
While it's true that big companies do not, with a few rare exceptions, do anything purely altruistic, it is not necessary to believe that Novell did something altruistic in this instance.
Novell thinks, probably correctly, that moves like this will enhance shareholder value. This will be accomplished by (1) inventing new things which will be useful to customers, (2) making the employees happier, which tends to lead to better productivity, (3) attracting quality employees, and (4) publicity.
Those four things all aid Novell's bottom line and not one of them is particularly sinister. It is not necessary to believe Novell is altruistic to appreciate what they have, in their own self-interest, done. Are the benefits to the Open Source movement and community greater than the benefits to Novell's shareholder's pocket books? Who cares? As long as there is *any* net positive for Open Source I, for one, don't care what other side effects may occur.
(edited to remove typo in closing tag)
Edited 2007-07-20 16:40
Member since:
2006-01-16
I wouldn't be surprised if this move wasn't all so "altruistic". Unsurprisingly, it's Novell who has most interest in Mono's survival, and the best way to ensure this is to make people depend on mono (microsoft strategy).
I see this as a particularly directed effort to spread mono dependencies with a nice coat on it.
NO COMPANY DOES ALTRUISTIC THINGS.. EVER! If you believe for a second that Novell did anything out of good heart, you are more naive than my mom (and that's a big naive there)