****Re: Novel and Microsoft

[Darrin Chandler]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 09:41:22AM -0700, Craig White wrote:
> 
> I am bothered by by the agreement but I am of cynical nature so I fail
> to see the positive aspects of this for Linux and can only conclude that
> this was corporate motivated greed to advance their market share and
> cash resources without any benefit to the open source community itself.
> Thus in the end, while SuSE has never made it on to any of the systems
> that I employ, the agreement ensures that it will never happen.

So far I've stayed out of this, but you've touched on something here
that's important to me.

First, no matter what Novell and/or Microsoft say, this isn't good for
the Open Source community. Not because it's Microsoft. Rather it has
more to do with the nature of any agreements between a proprietary
company and a company involved in FOSS.

What's good for FOSS is when a company opens up docs, or when a company
makes patent licenses freely avaiable to anyone. Agreements,
partnerships, and contracts between select entities do NOT help FOSS.
Developers writing drivers under NDA does NOT help FOSS. No amount of
spin changes that.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |