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On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 13:34:00 +0000 Jonathan Roberts <jonathan.roberts.uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Neil: You seem quite happy with openSUSE? For now, yes - as long as opensuse follows the path of Fedora. I'm a little dubious because the opensuse website makes a lot of "open source" and doesn't mention "free software" at all. It's a watching brief: I'm waiting to see how they react and how they deal with their sponsor. Fedora have proved that it can be done - and done well. > Do you not think the problems > related to Novell and Microsoft are also going to impact on the openSUSE > community? They don't have to, no. Whether they will is down to the opensuse guys. The licences allow them to diverge - it remains to be seen if they will. Distributions don't need sponsors, they certainly don't need heavy-handed sponsors and SuSE was around *before* Novell. If Novell mistreat opensuse, or are seen to have undue influence over things like Windows interoperability, the opensuse developers will have to move away from Novell or risk becoming a complete irrelevance to the community. Nothing harms distributions more than a lack of community support. Even if the sponsor goes bankrupt, the distribution can (and will) survive if the community want it to survive. *That* is the power of freedom and the GPL licence in particular. The GPL could be seen as a "fork licence" - it makes forks easy and almost encourages forking as a solution to irreconcilable differences within the development team. If there is sufficient community support and opensuse *fails* to distance itself from Novell properly, the community will probably create FreeSuSE or similar, just to ensure that the freedom remains. Mandrake was a fork of RedHat, Fedora is a fork of RHEL. Debian/Ubuntu is a little different, that has the feel of a derivative (with two way communication) but in essence, that is a fork too. It happens more at the package level: Firefox <-> Iceweasel. Mambo <-> Joomla. Wordpress is a fork and has been forked itself. > Afer all Novell really have a heavy influence in it's > development - at least from what I can tell; Hence my comments about > dropping openSUSE in favour of something else. That influence does not have to remain. That's the strength of the GPL - if someone tries to exert undue influence, the GPL encourages the rest to go off and do something else: a fork. The community has the last laugh. We get more choice and those who would try to despoil our efforts get a reduced market share. Sounds about right to me. :-) > I feel really out of my depth in all these discussions and wish I > understood more!!Still it's all an interesting read :-) Start at the GPL FAQ: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html As ever, the licence is at the core of all the issues in free software. Understand the licence and you understand the community - but remember, if there is a disagreement between you and the community, the community interest prevails. (as cdrecord -> wodim attests). -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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