A new major release of Novell's community-supported distro openSUSE 11 is now available and can be downloaded from the mirrors. Linux Format has a hands-on look at the new installer, SLAB menu and Compiz Fusion, and weighs up whether the distro can fight competition from Ubuntu and Fedora. Is this the start of a new era for SUSE?
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Member since:2008-06-19
Member since:2008-04-18
Yes, Novell contributes to many projects, but RedHat contributes much more to many more projects than Novell and RedHat did not sign a patents deal with Microsoft. Novell's contributions are not that important. The open source could do much better without Novell's "contributions" like Mono (banshee, tomboy and other useless applications). Why do we need Mono and C# when we have C++ and Java?
Member since:2006-11-24
Member since:2007-02-05
It us quite relevant that Novell are backing several OSS projects. I would even dare say it is *more* relevant than their deal. Important projects such as Evolution Mail Client are in some degree works of Novell/Ximian. They're really doing an effort to help the community and make business at the same bit. (The latter is good, because stuff that's able to make business are far more likely to gain traction than non-business friendly stuff.)
Regarding their deal with MS: I think Novell just is being pragmatic. They want to get Linux going, in the real world, and some business people have fears and they hope this will calm these fears. This is what *Novell* has decided to do, not necessarily all their employees agreed with(Miguel has criticized the deal despite being a high ranking Novell employee) and definitely not necessarily something their community agrees with.
Now, I don't agree with the deal. I believe it is/was a bad thing, but I understand why they did it and I don't let that deal blind me from seeing the good things Novell are doing! (Or stop me from supporting them in any way.)
Member since:2005-07-13
I'm sure the folks at Groklaw would be proud of your perceived public service.
The only problem is, that by focusing on an ambiguous claim that has been beaten to death more than any dead horse should ever have to suffer, you have overlooked many other factors.
You forgot to mention that people shouldn't support openSUSE, because of Novell's pesky interference with SCO's lawsuit against IBM over linux infringing unix code.
You also failed to mention that people shouldn't support openSUSE, because of Novell's attempts to thwart the OSS community by making SuSE an open project, GPLing the formerly proprietary Yast, and making multi-million dollar acquisitions simply to GPL products like AppArmor.
Perhaps unsuprisingly, you also failed to mention that people shouldn't support openSUSE because of Novell's heinous actions in support the Open Invention Network, and contributing patents to the community. Their $15M acquisition of the infamous Commerce One patents on e-commerce should not go unpunished, even if it was simply to make them open and accessible to everyone and prevent other companies from acquiring and abusing them for profit.
Most insidiously, with Novell's insistence on paying developers to contribute to core linux projects, such as the kernel, or Gnome, or KDE, or HAL, or openOffice, or whatnot, they are clearly trying to subvert every other linux project on the planet.
No doubt you're going to have to post a plea to Ubuntu users to please not support that distro due to their adoption of AppArmor, a clearly tainted Novell project.
And now that zypper has been ported to Fedora and is being experimented with, you may have to beg people to boycott Fedora soon, too.
Oh, and I almost forgot about compiz. You must be thankful that all of the other distributions failed to see through that charade, and chose not to adopt it by way of showing their disdain for the evil empire.
Fight the power!
Do you really feel better now? Because it's really sad if you do.
Member since:2008-04-18
This dead horse is never beaten enough. It should be beaten until the patents deal between Novell and Microsoft ceases to exist. The patents deal still exists. You may feel good knowing that you are patent protected but I refuse to be protected against Microsoft. All Linux users should refuse. When there are so many good (if not better) distributions out there, why would anybody want to use a tainted one?
Member since:
2008-04-18
Please stay away from Suse as long as Novell has a patent protection deal with Microsoft. Please do not contribute in any way to a distro that promotes Microsoft's interests in the Open Source world. Do not contribute by using this distro, by filling bug reports, by helping the community, by translating, by packaging, by submitting patches and so on.