On Novell and Microsoft

On Novell and Microsoft

Posted Nov 7, 2006 21:11 UTC (Tue) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
Parent article: On Novell and Microsoft

"For anybody who is trying to actually be a part of the free software
development community, however, Microsoft's promise has no value at all."

In business, a promise in general has no value at all. The only thing
which counts is a signed contract. Everything else is just hot air
(i18n("warme luft")).

Beside that, what has changed for Novell Customers ?
Imagine a company which wants to switch their servers completely from
Windows to Linux. For them this would be a strategic decision.
Customer: "So we'd like to switch to Linux"
SUSE: "That'd be great ! And if you choose SUSE, you can be sure MS won't
sue you in the next 5 years !"
Customer: "And what happens after 2012 ?"
SUSE: "Well, it seems we don't know..."

IMHO if a company wants to really switch, 5 years is worth not much.
There are some license costs, there is the cost for training the admin
staff and the costs for the work for actually doing the switch. All this
together is quite some money and effort. In this context 5 years don't
seem like a long time to me.

Alex

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