keith smith wrote:
> What would happen if the free software / open source community boycotted
> Suse?  And did it with a great noise?

You are referring to the "free software / open source community" as if
it was a coherent whole that can be directed or united under a cause.  I
can't believe that that could ever happen... mostly because there is
no such thing.  Rather, there are more and more embedded niche
communities, each with their own unique agendas.

You can't even combine the FS and OSS folks into one community.  There
are just too much philosophical differences to truly meld the two meta
communities.  A person in one camp could certainly respect the position
of a person in another and understand why he would think like this.. but
that's a far cry from being part of that community.

A personal rambling: Gnome and KDE have always been separated mostly by
two fundamental difference: Gnome is Free Software built with C while
KDE is Open Source Software built with C++.  They may seem like trivial
differences to those that don't care, but they make all the difference
in the world to the people that do.  I was solidly in the KDE camp
since, at my core, I am inescapably a pragmatist.  That didn't mean that
I didn't have a lot of respect for my Gnome counterparts, though.  I
admired their passion and zeal and was glad that they were contributing
to a diverse environment.  I could never be like that, though.  I would
rather something "just worked" than for it to be morally clean.  So
while you *could* think of KDE and Gnome being part of the Linux Desktop
Community... you'd be mostly wrong.

But I don't think you'd get any consensus even within those two
meta-camps.  As I said, the KDE camp tends to be more pragmatic than
moralistic, but there were quite a few very angry people on the internal
KDE lists about the Novell patent issue.  So even in a community like
KDE, you can't get agreement on issues like this.

Let's take it much much smaller and just look at the membership of this
list.  We have all types here from the "liberated software or death"
type to the "just get me something that works well" type.  There is no
way that this list could ever come to a consensus on the patent issue...
and this group is as small as it gets!  If we can't do it, what hopes
does a much much much larger community have?

And finally, any boycott against openSUSE would be pointless since
that's not a community project.  It makes more sense to boycott SLE or
the Novell Desktop since those are the products that Novell is making
money off of as a result of the MS deal.

Kurt

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