On Tuesday 04 November 2003 04:24 pm, Kaj Haulrich wrote:
On Tuesday 04 November 2003 04:05 pm, Tom Brinkman wrote:
On Tuesday 04 November 2003 09:05 am, Carroll Grigsby wrote:
According to this article, Novell has just purchased Suse for $210 million: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5101680.html -- cmg
I think this is A Good Thing for Linux. Not so good for Red Hat or Mandrake's enterprise efforts. But, the first thing that crossed my mind (actually Novell - SuSE acquisition has been rumored for a while), is how will this affect the SCO fiasco? Novell has rights to Unix code licensing, and can amend SCO's rights, which are subordinate. Or so Novell claims, and SCO is reluctant to admit.
And now, what's next ? - IBM buys Mandrake ?
Kaj Haulrich.
What's next, only time will tell. IBM has been a strong Linux supporter for several years. To the tune that they put about $75Mil into SuSE a year or so ago. Now that's been acquired by Novell, also a strong Linux support group, an the reason they split from SCO some time back. BUT, SuSE, IBM, and Novell also have current an prior relationships and agreements. IBM is ante'g up $50 million into these Novell/Ximian/SuSE collaboration efforts. SuSE came out smellin like a rose. I believe so did Novell.
So I just view it as circlin the wagons in a more concerted effort for OSS/GNU/Linux to take over the Net and enterprise. Fsck M$ et al. The money involved is relatively peanuts anyhow for Novell, not even pocket change for IBM. For an indicator, http://news.netcraft.com/ notice that Apache's (on Un*x) gain, mirrors M$ loss. BTW, IBM involvement is significant to me. They're about 19 on the world's largest companies. For perspective, Microsoft is somewhere in the 170's. BUT...
So we're still here, just the 1 or 2% of the desktop users runnin Linux. RedHat wants to go enterprise only. No surprise they always considered regular users as a nuisance (which they are) for a commercial distro. Realistically there's only two major community sponsored choices left, Mandrake an Debian. I ain't goin anywhere, but there's much less than 1 or 2% left. What to do? ....
So y'all can help, or give up. One or the other, no free rides. Join the Club, but also,
tom $ cat /etc/mandrake-release
Mandrake Linux release 10.0 (Cooker) for i586 got goin yesterday. Install an test it, specially those with ready made marginal hardware (Dell, Gateway, Compaq, any laptop, etc). Subscribe (lurk) on the cooker and change log lists, contribute when you can. When it's done in a few months, you can feel proud that you helped ... or you can resort to being one of those that sings the same old song 'Mandrake hasn't been a good release <insert prior release>, this one should'a had more work an testing' ....
I've never done any distro testing, since I only have a 4GB hard drive, and it's currently 93% full. However, I should be getting a new box in a few weeks' time, with enough space for a an extra Linux partition, and enough speed to make it worthwhile compiling RPMs (I've only done that once, for LyX, but I can relearn how to do it pretty quickly). I'll be happy to test anything that doesn't blow up my monitor (remembering the good old days when you edited a modeline and said a prayer before typing "startx").
Sir Robin
-- "Certitude is possible for those who only own one encyclopedia." - Robert Anton Wilson
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
