Mother Teresa and Linus heros together ...
http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/torvalds.html
And what about Richard Stallman ? A super-hero ? We have Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Stallman ...
Thursday 30 November 2006
Reflections around the Novell - Microsoft Linux deal
Novell (Suse Linux) and Microsoft have recently announced a cooperation agreement, probably coming from the need to work on interoperability in virtual environments.
This in itself was a scoop, since Crimosoft was finally admitting Linux was really here in the business landscape and not simply a subversive communist movement like Ballmer earlier barked.
But on top of that, several layers of interesting stuff piled up.
- Crimosoft could not resist mentioning patent coverage for their partner's customers, which is a nonsense regarding the GPL license covering most FOSS work (read). This created a lot of fuss in the community. Of course, everybody believes Crimosoft was behind the SCO FUD and thought this new story was the last invention of Crimosoft. Novell was then forced to comment and say that there was no patent issue, according to them.
- Then Mark Shuttleworth, who is behind Ubuntu with Canonical, could not resist posting to the Suse mailing list (read) to invite the OpenSuse developpers to quit and join Ubuntu. By doing that, he won the nickname of "Shark Muddleworth" in a satirical reply on Ubuntu forums (read). Not a very good move for Mark, who has certainly underestimated the reaction of the OpenSuse community. Come on, Mark, these guys are not children and they don't need anybody to make their own decisions. There is a nice comment about this story in Linux.com (read).
I think that all this buzz is quite interesting.
First, Crimosoft looks like the MPAA/RIAA, fighting on the intellectual rights field and using FUD rather than competing face to face on the basis of the quality and features of their products. They have locked their customers in, they have no respect for them, and they don't care openly pressurising them. This is not a scoop but the latest episode.
Second, it is clear for me that many people will leave the OpenSuse community in reaction to a deal they don't like. See the comments of the Samba guys (read). They will move to the other popular distros, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Mepis, Mandriva, Debian or Gentoo.
This leads me to the subject of how to select the right distribution. Here and there, we can see flame wars about the best distributions. For me, as a GNU/Linux techie desktop user, I need the following things :
- A up-to-date distribution with recent versions of my favorite packages, such as Open Office, Firefox, KDE, The Gimp, Blender.
- A wide software offer for less regular needs.
- An active community to find solutions in case of trouble.
- A good citizenship in the community, no hassle.
- The other points such as eye-candy are nonsense since you can easily customize the look&feel of your desktop, and anyway the next version of KDE will integrate a lot more eye-candy.
Among the distributions I've quoted above, I don't like Fedora and Ubuntu. Mepis uses the Ubuntu packages and is in the same bag.
I don't like Ubuntu because I don't like Shuttleworth. This individual has burned 20 million dollars to spend a few days in space. This is a shame. This shocks my ethics. Money should be respected and not spent such a crazy way. I think this guy will deliver bad surprises to the community. Ubuntu is an independant entity ? My foot. You don't bite the hand which feeds you and I cannot see how these guys are going to live without the Canonical money. And he boarded a sputnik because he was not worth a shuttle ;-)
I don't like Fedora because I prefer distributions coming from small companies like Mandriva or from not-for-profit entities like Debian, or Gentoo.
In fact, I don't want to use a distribution coming from an entity which would one day push me against my will in a direction I don't like. I like freedom. I have left Crimosoft one day because they were asking me a code to authorize the 3rd installation of their bugged software and treated me like a thief.
I'm using Gentoo and Mandriva. Gentoo for the fun, but believe me, it is time consuming. The good point is that I know my machine in all details and I can tweak this /etc config file or that one to do what I want. Thanks to Gentoo, I think I know what a Linux distribution is. I'm generally using Mandriva on my notebook because it works well and Mandriva is too small a company to ever annoy me. Mmmm. At the moment, I use Ubuntu. Just because I cannot understand all the noise around it. And up to now, I've not understood. Yesterday, the software management tool crashed and I had to suppress a .lock file by hand to restart it. Surprising. With Mandriva I've never seen such a stupid bug. And I'm really, really upset by this sudo thing. Sometimes, you really need to be root to work.
Mandriva is fighting to survive through their sales. Nobody is pouring millions without counting into it. This is respectable.
For-profit Linux players are useful for the community. We should not forget that a lot of interesting FOSS come from companies such as Sun or IBM. The Mozilla Foundation makes a lot of money through their Google deal.
The key point is not here.
The key point is : is this or that company dangerous for my freedom ? Are they going to lock me in one day one way or another ?
Mandriva will not - any time soon.
This in itself was a scoop, since Crimosoft was finally admitting Linux was really here in the business landscape and not simply a subversive communist movement like Ballmer earlier barked.
But on top of that, several layers of interesting stuff piled up.
- Crimosoft could not resist mentioning patent coverage for their partner's customers, which is a nonsense regarding the GPL license covering most FOSS work (read). This created a lot of fuss in the community. Of course, everybody believes Crimosoft was behind the SCO FUD and thought this new story was the last invention of Crimosoft. Novell was then forced to comment and say that there was no patent issue, according to them.
- Then Mark Shuttleworth, who is behind Ubuntu with Canonical, could not resist posting to the Suse mailing list (read) to invite the OpenSuse developpers to quit and join Ubuntu. By doing that, he won the nickname of "Shark Muddleworth" in a satirical reply on Ubuntu forums (read). Not a very good move for Mark, who has certainly underestimated the reaction of the OpenSuse community. Come on, Mark, these guys are not children and they don't need anybody to make their own decisions. There is a nice comment about this story in Linux.com (read).
I think that all this buzz is quite interesting.
First, Crimosoft looks like the MPAA/RIAA, fighting on the intellectual rights field and using FUD rather than competing face to face on the basis of the quality and features of their products. They have locked their customers in, they have no respect for them, and they don't care openly pressurising them. This is not a scoop but the latest episode.
Second, it is clear for me that many people will leave the OpenSuse community in reaction to a deal they don't like. See the comments of the Samba guys (read). They will move to the other popular distros, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Mepis, Mandriva, Debian or Gentoo.
This leads me to the subject of how to select the right distribution. Here and there, we can see flame wars about the best distributions. For me, as a GNU/Linux techie desktop user, I need the following things :
- A up-to-date distribution with recent versions of my favorite packages, such as Open Office, Firefox, KDE, The Gimp, Blender.
- A wide software offer for less regular needs.
- An active community to find solutions in case of trouble.
- A good citizenship in the community, no hassle.
- The other points such as eye-candy are nonsense since you can easily customize the look&feel of your desktop, and anyway the next version of KDE will integrate a lot more eye-candy.
Among the distributions I've quoted above, I don't like Fedora and Ubuntu. Mepis uses the Ubuntu packages and is in the same bag.
I don't like Ubuntu because I don't like Shuttleworth. This individual has burned 20 million dollars to spend a few days in space. This is a shame. This shocks my ethics. Money should be respected and not spent such a crazy way. I think this guy will deliver bad surprises to the community. Ubuntu is an independant entity ? My foot. You don't bite the hand which feeds you and I cannot see how these guys are going to live without the Canonical money. And he boarded a sputnik because he was not worth a shuttle ;-)
I don't like Fedora because I prefer distributions coming from small companies like Mandriva or from not-for-profit entities like Debian, or Gentoo.
In fact, I don't want to use a distribution coming from an entity which would one day push me against my will in a direction I don't like. I like freedom. I have left Crimosoft one day because they were asking me a code to authorize the 3rd installation of their bugged software and treated me like a thief.
I'm using Gentoo and Mandriva. Gentoo for the fun, but believe me, it is time consuming. The good point is that I know my machine in all details and I can tweak this /etc config file or that one to do what I want. Thanks to Gentoo, I think I know what a Linux distribution is. I'm generally using Mandriva on my notebook because it works well and Mandriva is too small a company to ever annoy me. Mmmm. At the moment, I use Ubuntu. Just because I cannot understand all the noise around it. And up to now, I've not understood. Yesterday, the software management tool crashed and I had to suppress a .lock file by hand to restart it. Surprising. With Mandriva I've never seen such a stupid bug. And I'm really, really upset by this sudo thing. Sometimes, you really need to be root to work.
Mandriva is fighting to survive through their sales. Nobody is pouring millions without counting into it. This is respectable.
For-profit Linux players are useful for the community. We should not forget that a lot of interesting FOSS come from companies such as Sun or IBM. The Mozilla Foundation makes a lot of money through their Google deal.
The key point is not here.
The key point is : is this or that company dangerous for my freedom ? Are they going to lock me in one day one way or another ?
Mandriva will not - any time soon.
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