Novell could be out of the Linux business

Novell could be out of the Linux business

Posted Nov 4, 2006 21:13 UTC (Sat) by donkyhotay (guest, #41493)
In reply to: Novell could be out of the Linux business by JoeBuck
Parent article: Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft

I think this is the beginning of an attempt to "kill" linux. Sure they have the clause it won't affect "non-commercial linux" but if they can kill off the big commercial companies then they can easily prevent small commercial linux companies from ever starting. Without SOME commercial incentive linux dies. Think about it, lots of people help with linux but linux needs the companies to move at the rate it does. Think about it, if red-hat suddenly died then fedora would slow up. Same thing for all the other major distro's (debian, ubuntu, suse, etc.) people run on their systems. It wouldn't COMPLETELY die (people at home would work on it) but it would be a serious blow to linux development. But I don't think taking out home linux use is microsofts goal. They dominate the home market already. I believe M$ is looking long-term which requires expansion. With their control of the personal computer market the only place big for them to go is onto the servers (which are mostly unix/linux). The servers also generally run the commercial versions. So they aim to wipe out the commercial linux companies. Their customers are forced to run SOMETHING on their servers and they're going to want tech-support that non-commercial options can't provide. This leaves as the only option (surprise) microsoft enterprise! Then after controlling both the servers and the home computers they can work on grinding out macOS. After that they would leave us few devoted NON-COMMERCIAL linux developers around in order to say to the world "we're not a monopoly! Look at those linux developers!" Of course the second any linux developer actually attempts to earn some money with linux then they would declare them commercial and stamp them out. Now novell of course is the one in danger but if they can pull this off then it'll be easier the next time. What worries me more is they might be attempting to work their copyrights into the GPL so that they are in direct conflict with each other. Then it goes to court to determine if microsofts copyright is stronger then the GPL. I can just imaging getting 12 random people that hear about "copyright infringement" (everyone knows copyright infringement is bad) and then hear about "violating the GPL" (GPL? what the @#$% is a GPL?) combined with all the money microsoft can pour into it and the next thing you know the GPL is overturned.

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