Hey everyone,
I just saw this posted on http://www.planetsuse.org/ (a good place to
read what people inside Novell think of everything). Ted Haeger (he
presented on XGL/Compiz last SLLUG meeting), who hosts Novell’s podcast
Novell Open Audio, will be doing an interview on the Microsoft/Novell
announcement. He's asking for listeners to provide questions to ask.
Here's a link to his posting about the interview:
http://reverendted.wordpress.com/2006/11/03/microsoft-novell-and-novell-open-audio/
So, just as a disclaimer, I work for Novell and therefore I'm not going
to go into much detail about my feelings. However, I do think that many
in the OpenSource community are painting this in the worse possible
light. I also knew nothing of the announcement before it was made and
can't and don't represent Novell in anything I say here.
Like I just said above, I think that the OpenSource community has taken
this in the worse possible light before knowing the details of the
agreement. There's sure been a lot of jumping to conclusions going on
and Red Hat has already started to capitalize on this sentiment. Of
course, it's in their best interest to make Novell, their competitor
look as evil as possible. As an example of things taken differently
than their original intent, as I understand (and IANAL!!!), the
agreement about patents and not suing each other was just that, an
agreement not to sue each other's customers. As I've heard, Novell and
MS have absolutely no interest in getting anything out of anyone else,
just in making their own customers feel OK about running each other
company's software in a mixed environment. Personally I don't think it
should have been emphasized much in the press releases.
No one outside (and most people inside, like me) know much about the
agreement yet. I'm sure the details of the announcement will be made
more clear in the coming days. I really can't comment in any official
capacity on what Novell does or how I feel about Microsoft since I work
for Novell but I will say that the picture being painted inside the OSS
community is completely opposite from what has been said so far about
the intent of the agreement within Novell. They understand the GPL and
they *do* understand *where* the product they are basing their future on
comes from. They have no intention to disrupt, inhibit or destroy
Linux, the OSS movement, the GPL or any other FOSS license.
I have no idea what Microsoft's intentions are but they have customers
who want to and are running Linux. I imagine that they want to get
support contracts ($$) for those customers since they *will* be running
Linux regardless of what Microsoft wants them to run.
So, that being said, the Novell Open Audio interview should be a good
one to participate in if you have a question to ask. It should be
educational to listen to as well. Again, I don't and won't represent
Novell and therefore will pretty much try my best to abstain from
participating in threads regarding this matter any further but I am
interested in seeing what people think and say so have at it...
--
Marc Christensen
http://blog.mecworks.com
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