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On Novell's acquisition of SUSEOn Novell's acquisition of SUSEPosted Nov 4, 2003 21:20 UTC (Tue) by marduk (subscriber, #3831)Parent article: On Novell's acquisition of SUSE The thing that scares me about this is... Novell once "owned" Unix, and they didn't know what to do with it. Now we have to Linux-friendly companies (Ximian and now SUSE) that, prior to their acquisitions, seemed to have a lot of potential. I just hope that Novell doesn't drop the ball on these guys else Ximian and SUSE can be added to a long line of Linux has-beens, which would be a big blow to the community.
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On Novell's acquisition of SUSE Posted Nov 4, 2003 22:41 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I am beginning to think that corporations by definition cannot own a Free software project without changing its fundamental character and cooling its momentum (what some might call "screwing it up"). :-) It all comes down to the different motivation the corporation has (again, by definition, not because of any nefarious plot within any given corporation) to make "products". The strength of a community project is that it is amorphous--its edges are ill-defined, and this allows people to help change and improve it through the discussion/flamewar/incremental process :-) whereas a corporation needs to have a well-defined entity that has sharp edges, so they can say, 'this is Our Product v28.0, please buy it from us'. Customers want to know what they're buying. Community members are more flexible, since there's no money changing hands and so what is Mine and what is Yours (the boundary line) doesn't matter so much.The problem is, sealing down the edges to make a Product tends to quiet down the (dare we say it?) "innovation" at the edges and the project tends to start to calcify. It seems to take a really charismatic and very clued-in corporation to keep the momentum going the way it does naturally in a community project. Anyway, just my observations/blathering. Feel free to ignore...
On Novell's acquisition of SUSE Posted Nov 5, 2003 5:05 UTC (Wed) by foo@share-foo.com (guest, #7940) [Link] Modded +2 InsightfulI hope the Novell execs read your post.
On Novell's acquisition of SUSE Posted Nov 5, 2003 0:58 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] If they just keep paying the employees and don't interfere more with the projects, that would be fine in the cases of SuSE and Ximian, while it wasn't wise in the cases of projects that were originally more corporate. The projects these people are working on are not under Novell's control, anyway, due to having other members, so Novell's lack of direction with respect to its acquisitions isn't a problem.My suspicion as far as SuSE is that they want to sell Netware with Linux internals, and they therefore want to ensure (and assure their customers) that Linux won't dry up. Unless they actually have some sort of Linux branch, they have to worry about waking up one morning to find that all of the Linux developers have decided to go to grad school. But with a Linux branch, they can be confident that the projects will continue even if everyone else working on them decides to work on something else instead.
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