Mark Shuttleworth's mail to the openSUSE devs

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the Ubuntu Linux distribution, posted a controversial mail to the openSUSE mailing list hoping to steal developers away from the openSUSE project. A lot of developers saw this mail as a really lame attempt and told Mark to "fuck off".

Mark, I'd say that you first go fix you're 64-bit support and remove the binary blobs from the kernel before sneaking at openSUSE developers. What you did here is really lame. I'm wondering if you really want to start a distro war. I'd expect from a person like you to be much more flexible in that matter. What Novell did is definitely bad, IMO, but that doesn't mean that you should start poking on openSUSE developers and packagers. If you disagree with the current actions Novell has taken, then I'd suggest you start bashing on Novell and not on openSUSE. Remember, the openSUSE project is a community driven project, the devs still have the final word on what goes in and what not.

Instead of fighting against each others, I'd suggest we team up together and work on areas in Linux that still need a lot of improvements. Your disrespectful mail will only bring the 2 distributions further apart. Mark, if the openSUSE devs feel that they should jump ship, they have enough brains to decide when to do it.

Oh.... Mark.... wait, JBoss, which is now part of Red Hat also has an agreement with M$, maybe you should start bashing on Red Hat too. Or maybe you need another space walk to the International Space Station to clear your head a bit... spaceman!

M$ + Novell = M$ control of corporate Linux?

The MS/Novell deal caused a pretty big disturbance in the FOSS community. I know that this has been covered many times on a lot of web sites but I just wanted to give my personal point of view and I'll make it as short as possible :)

MS saw for the past 5 years or so that it's losing market share to Linux in the enterprise market and it will continue to lose. Now that they have a deal with one of the major companies that are involved in Enterprise Linux, they can use it to split the FOSS community in two. On one side you'll have the commercial FOSS developers who will be "protected" by this agreement between Novell & MS. On the other side you'll have the non-commercial guy who is contributing to the FOSS community but is not "protected" by MS in any way.

That is what MS is looking for. Once they split the FOSS community in two, which they are trying to do that right now using their contract with Novell to spread FUD that they can sue you if you don't use SUSE products, it will be much easier for them to control the commercial side of Linux trough Novell's SLES/SLED products. When they accomplish this, they can stab Novell in the back by breaking the contract thus making it very easy to enforce their patents if Novell decides to insert some MS code into their products during the contracts period.

I just fail to see how this deal could be good for Novell or the FOSS community in general.