[lug] Bruce Perens's open letter to Novell

[Daniel Webb]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 11:36:17AM -0700, Ferdinand Schmid wrote:

> Below is a link to an article that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a Linux
> advocate, wrote for e-week:
> 
> http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4468266798.html
> 
> It shows that at least IBM strongly feels that this agreement is good
> for Linux overall.  
> 
> The essence of the article appears to be: 
> Linux is at this point unstoppable and this agreement shows that even
> Microsoft agrees with that.  So now may be the time to do what everybody
> did once they discovered that the Internet wasn't going away, which is
> throw their own hat in the ring.

It is possible that it will be good for Linux, but I'm skeptical.  Microsoft
still has a lot of tricks up their sleeve to defeat powerful competitors (ie.
Netscape's huge market dominance or IBM's OS attempt).  They may have
determined that none of their standard tricks work for the server market and
have decided that Linux is an "unstoppable force".  Maybe.

It still doesn't change the fact that what Novell did was clearly unethical.