Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 20:43 UTC (Mon) by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
Parent article: Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

I don't share the negative thoughts about the "we don't know yet" answers; Novell is a public company, and until the deal closes, Attachmate is not much more than just a regular shareholder.... integration+investigation can only really start at the actual closing of the deal.

However, the whole interview talks about "taking from Open Source" and "using what the community provides".. but nothing about giving back to the community..other than a little blurb about the kernel.
I suspect Attachmate has a lot of learning to do....

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 20, 2010 21:06 UTC (Mon) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link]

Long live SUSE/OpenSUSE

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 6:43 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (4 responses)

To be fair, he stated several times that they want to participate and invest in the community. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and some time for the dust to settle before judging.

I can remember the uproar when SuSE was bought by Novell and the end of the world scenarios. In the final analysis I'd say that quite to the contrary it was a very good thing to happen. I can't remember any incident where Novell really hurt the community (even the infamous Microsoft deal has not had any consequences yet and it's been years). Instead they founded the openSUSE project, put Yast under GPL and built tools like the openSUSE build service, that even helps other distributions.

Could very well be that Attachmate will just continue in that direction and that a standalone SUSE business unit can be more free in a technical sense as well. Integrating and developing Novell's middleware did for sure take a lot of resources.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 8:26 UTC (Tue) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (3 responses)

> even the infamous Microsoft deal has not had any consequences yet and it's been years

I can name four consequences: Mono, Moonlight, Banshee and F-Spot. The Novell-Microsoft deal is the sole reason why a Microsoft-owned platform is invading our Linux desktops.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 8:34 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think so. These projects are driven by Novell and perhaps were part of the motivation into signing the deal but other distributions adopting them by default has nothing whatsoever to do with the Microsoft deal. As far as Fedora is concerned however, none of these are included by default. So it is "invading" anything.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 8:39 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

And quite ironically, even an openSUSE desktop does not use them by default.

Attachmate Acquisition: What does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE & open source?

Posted Dec 21, 2010 19:37 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

Even more ironically, Ubuntu which has not deal with MS (to my knowledge) does.