Novell acquires Ximian

Posted Aug 7, 2003 20:13 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link]

To the extent that other distros adopt the deeper OS changes required to run Ximian, it will remain compatible with them. And based on Ximian's participation in freedesktop.org, I'd imagine such changes would be both thoroughly-considered and shared with KDE and other relevant projects.

But this does give them a lot more flexibility. For example, FAM needs kernel support to track file changes, which is extremely helpful for file managers; making their own distribution means they can include this feature in the kernel and desktop, and not worry so much that, say, "The stock Slackware kernel doesn't include FAM, so Ximian is broken on Slackware". Now they don't need to support Slackware 100% for their business model.

So I don't share your concern that this will break other distros. I think they'll just use it to do some more interesting innovation, and it would behoove the other distros (and the deeper OS maintainers themselves) to include these innovations too.