Novell and SuSE

On Sat, 2004-01-17 at 18:44, Chris Gehlker wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2004, at 3:29 PM, Derek Neighbors wrote:
>
> > No one has called SuSE the devil.
>
> Certainly *you* haven't. I think some others have come pretty close.
>
> >
> >> FOSS. SUSE just goes the extra step of denying de jure what the GPL
> >> denies de facto. And while Red Hat may forgo the use of copyright law
> >
> > If it is so guaranteed, then why do they feel it necessary to put it in
> > writing?
>
> This is a question that I have asked myself and the only answer that I
> can come up with is that they are simply being pig headed. Red Hat put
> anaconda under the GPL and it hasn't hurt them any. I don't see how any
> commercial advantage that accrues to SUSE could possibly outweigh the
> bad publicity.
---
I hope that you don't mean me - labeling SuSE as the devil. I knew that
YAST was proprietary because it hasn't been adopted elsewhere...that
seemed obvious but I was unaware of the exact license that it had. My
remarks about SuSE were mostly from the direction that some newbie posts
up about a problem and the suggestion hurled from the cheap seats is to
change distro's. I wouldn't feel any differently if the suggestion were
to change to Red Hat or Debian or whatever...the typical newbie is
likely to become more frustrated and confused every time he has to start
over.

Now there is a world of difference between Red Hat marking specific
files with their copyright which must be 'cleansed' in order to
redistribute and SuSE not allowing the YAST code to be sold by anyone.
Red Hat is only claiming a reserve on their collection as a whole and
each part and piece is fully usable for review, for whatever purpose.
YAST - by restricting the sale of any/all YAST code is a break of faith
with the Free Software principals - you cannot lift even a single line
of code from it if there is any chance of it being resold. There is an
old saying that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch and this 'apple'
taints the distro since it so severely limits application.

Consider only the possibilities of the fedora distribution which Richard
characterized as a 'bail out' by Red Hat. It's entirely likely that
there will be packaging of specific applications using the fedora (or
successive) cores which could actually be sold or not sold by others. I
think there is a project named Alice that is doing that already. Though
it seems that for Red Hat purposes, the fedora core (and successors),
the intent is sort of a permanent beta, there is the genesis of support
for maintaining the fedora core beyond Red Hat's term which in essence
moves it more into the stable category. None of this is possible with
YAST. It's obvious that unless Novell changes the SuSE YAST license, it
will remain isolated and provincial. Time has a way of determining which
direction proves ultimately more successful.

Craig