On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Ken Yap wrote: > http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-02-08-002-20-NW-SS > > The sad part is Fairfax IT took an already misrepresented story in > LinuxGram and condensed it to "Linux doesn't work". Always be wary of > journos. Actually, it seems to me that the Fairfax IT story is a pretty fair representation of the LinuxGram story. The LinuxGram story seems a little unfair, but if the quotes are true, only a little. What seems clear is that SuSE sacked a lot of people in a very unpleasant and dishonest way, ie. they lied about it, in the process basically implying their employees were liars. I think that it's true that Linux is more a version of Unix than a revolutionary leap. What's revolutionary about linux is the model, the philosophy, not the OS. The OS is nice, certainly, but it's the openness of it that is truly different. It's to be expected that there will be tension at the point where companies try to commercialise an OS built on the idea of Freedom and openness. What really dissapoints me is that it seems that SuSE, or at least Wiegand, is venting a frustration about his inability to match money making with linux on the whole linux OS. I'd like to see confirmation of his comments (ideally a whole transcript), before I be too hard and fast, but it seems that Wiegand/SuSE is taking a big dump on the community he/it should feel some affinity with. I certainly wouldn't be in a hurry to use or recommend SuSE after this. It's to be expected that a purely commercial enterprise might get bitter about things as stuff goes wrong, but I expect better from a business that would like the goodwill of the linux community. Of course, it's to be expected that comments like this will do commercial damage to linux. If I had purely business objectives and a mediocre understanding of the tech issues, I'm sure I'd be influenced by a business with the insider status of SuSE that was openly saying things like the quotes in the article. My only hope is that the small snippets quoted are incorrect or are taken grossly out of context, always a possibility. If you have a look at the top page you'll see their top three stories are negative, and that when they cover stuff like IBM injecting money into linux they use words like "throws" and "plow", which seem like negative spinning to me. So maybe they've done a hatchet job here. Let's hope so. Martin -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
