Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org) [LWN.net]

BR-Linux.org presents a community interview with Novell, here's a summary of the responses: "One of the questions, sent by the reader semente, wasn't answered at all, other answers look evasive, some of them repeat known company policy without adding much more meat to it (the deal was about interoperability, you know), but most of them may reveal more than a glimpse of unfiltered opinion: Novell believes there should be one open standard and that standard is ODF, We do not believe that Linux infringes on any Microsoft patents, We welcome GPLv3, and so forth." (Thanks to Augusto Campos).

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Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Sep 28, 2007 1:50 UTC (Fri) by heksys (guest, #41569) [Link]

Here we go again, waking up the dead ! There are better things out there we can be doing people. We have to finish taking down Vista .

Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Sep 28, 2007 2:39 UTC (Fri) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link]

I'm more keen to see the death of MS-OOXML.

Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Sep 28, 2007 12:58 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Exactly. Since Vista will already die on its own.

Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Sep 28, 2007 8:10 UTC (Fri) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Perhaps because I'm biased, and likely because I see the thing from the inside, but the answers looked reasonable to me. It is Novell's position, everybody is free to disagree, but it is not that bad at all IMHO... actually it is working positively for Linux and the community in general.

One thing I don't understand is: which is the unanswered question?

Not answering a question is bad for me, but they said there were ten questions, and I counted ten questions with answers in the article. Which is the missing one?

Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Sep 28, 2007 10:50 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

The unanswered question (which appears grouped with another one) is: "Would Novell adopt the GPLv3 licensing in any of its software? What are the reasons? (semente)".

You are right, the answers are not that bad, and they are doing good work. It is just that Novell was played by Microsoft like a fiddle in the patent issue, IMHO.

Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Sep 28, 2007 14:52 UTC (Fri) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

> It is just that Novell was played by Microsoft like a fiddle in the patent issue, IMHO.

Or at least the new CEO was, yes. But that seems to have been dramatically turned around with Microsoft's open-ended vouchers for Suse Linux and the carefully written last minute changes to GPL 3. At least, given Microsoft's reaction to that, it took them by (unpleasant) surprise.

Novell's continued sponsorship of Miguel "Never met a Microsoft product he didn't like" D'Icaza's pet projects is more worrying; I'd just as soon not see stuff that really is MS patent-encumbered (dot-net, silverlight) infesting the Linux desktop.

However, Novell is also sponsoring some very worthwhile efforts, such as the Linux Driver Project mentioned in a later news item.