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Neil Williams wrote: > 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. > Fedora have a lot of Red Hat involvement though. For example I know over half the Fedora Project board (I think that's the right term) are all employers of Red Hat, and so obviously they have a lot of say in where the project goes. > >> 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. > I like this point! I hope it's the case too because I think, like Fedora, a lot of the key developers are employed by Novell - but like you said they likely care alot about Free Software and the community themselves, hence the reason they work for Novell, and so rather than become an irellevence will move to something else, or fork. > 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). > I've been and had a look, I think it will take me a while to read the whole thing but I'm going to give it a good read. Thanks so much for the detailed replies. I find it really interesting and having only been following the community for a year or so, I've not seen all these kinds of things before! Thanks again, Jon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html