Kennon’s Space

Oh shit my brother sent this to me and I went into some bizarro flashback coma for the duration. If you knew me in the eighties then you’ll know why.

Thanks to Mark Shuttleworth Microsoft’s divide and conquer strategy for Linux has already begun paying dividends. And I thought Ubuntu meant something about community. I guess every community has to have it’s trolls. Yeah I know, a lot of people are going to say something 12ish like “Well Novell started it”. I have teenagers, and that argument holds here just as well as it does in the back of the car on a long trip.

I think this reply sums my feelings up best about Ubuntu.

Thanks Mark…

So the dust is starting to settle on the Novell/M$ deal. It is not the daily topic of conversation anymore. I think the rational voices are now going to start getting a chance to be heard. Here is an article on CNN Money that has a letter from John Dragoon of Novell discussing a lot of important facets to the deal. I guess the Free Software Foundation is going to make sure that GPLv3 is written in such a way that no deal like this could ever be made again. I am not sure what the current situation is but I know there is a lot of controversy over GPLv3 regarding DRM and patents. Even if it is ratified on time next spring I don’t see a lot of projects adopting it anytime soon. The kernel certainly won’t be seeing GPLv3 anytime soon. The author of this CNN piece makes the statement that the deal will be dead by March which is largely FUD and pretty uninformed considering it is going to take a long time for GPLv3 adoption to occur. It is going to be a long long time, probably years, if ever, before the kernel converts to it. Novell and Oracle and Microsoft, and Sun etc are all big enough to fork any project they want to keep it in GPLv2 forever. Maybe this is where commercial and non-commercial Linux part ways?

So, you know you live in a backwards ass community when you see a headline like this: “County students to star in ‘Jungle Fever’” in the local paper. I mean if it weren’t for all the really good Mexican restaurants my little Tulare County could be in the middle of Kansas or Nebraska. I love living in a town where the term Jungle Fever doesn’t mean anything except for some kids are going to read some Disney out loud. I sent this link to a friend of mine who lives in the Bay Area and he was blown away. When I lived on the east coast I would have crapped myself if I saw this. Now I just raise an eyebrow, let out a sigh, and blog it

So, chances are if you are reading this you know about the Novell/M$ partnership that was announced Thursday. I have to admit that at first when I heard about the deal as I was watching the press release live I was a little excited, giddy maybe. But now that time has mellowed the impact of the announcement and I have done a lot more reading I am no longer very giddy. I am not sure how to describe how I feel about this situation. There is an article by The Joe Barr over at Linux.com that at this point kind of sums up my feelings on the subject right now. But the more I think about this deal and the more I think about how deals like this with M$ have turned out for other companies the more negative my thoughts become. On the extreme side of my feelings, which are certainly the most amusing to read about, I have a feeling of betrayal. I have been supporting Novell now for several years. I have dropped a lot of time and energy into deploying their Linux solution where I work. And if this whole “Partnership” ends up blowing up in their face…Well lets just say I will be a tad upset. I really want something like this to be for real but time and time again Redmonds policy of “Partnerships” with anyone selling a competing product have invariably been very bad for the smaller partner. At this point I think it is wise to adopt a wait and see approach. As a former and possibly future Red Hat devotee I wish Red Hat the best of luck in all of this shite. At first glance this looks to be very bad for them. But in the long run it may infact turn out to be a stroke of luck. If M$ devours Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu could stand to reap the benefits. I hope I am wrong about all of this though.
This especially sucks because of all the time and money my company has spent on Novell training for me . At least 75% of the Suse specific stuff carries over to other distros.