Where Would We Be Without Novell?

Take a look at this list:

http://www.novell.com/company/affiliations/

Novell is involved in coding, testing, and/or supporting everything on that list. Some of that is a result of the SuSE acquisition, but their participation in Apache, PERL, PHP, etc. predates that.

So here is my question: if you removed Novell from Open Source, where would we be? What would Linux look like?

Now take a look at that list again.

Gnome, KDE, Apache, Perl, PHP, Wine, XEN, AppArmor, Open Office, PostgreSQL, Mozilla, Mono, and MySQL all have received code or monetary support from Novell and their developers.

I reckon that if you really hate Novell, then you shouldn't use any of their code.

Good luck with that.

"Borked Pseudo Mailed" wrote in message

> Take a look at this list:
>
> http://www.novell.com/company/affiliations/
>
> Novell is involved in coding, testing, and/or supporting everything on
that list. Some of that is a result of the SuSE acquisition, but their
participation in Apache, PERL, PHP, etc. predates that.
>
> So here is my question: if you removed Novell from Open Source, where
would we be? What would Linux look like?
>

Well, do not forget that Novell purchased Unix System Labs from AT&T which
at the time
was busy suing the University of California, Berkeley alleging copyright
infringement on
BSD Unix. As these things go the law firm that was busy leeching money from
USL for
this lawsuit assumed after the sale that things would stay as they are, and
it took pressure
from Ray Noordra, the then CEO of Novell, for the law firm to actually
respond to the
court's demand for data, and eventually do an out-of-court settlement that
indemnified
BSD from future lawsuits from USL.

OTOH, Novell did then sell USL several years later, losing millions, and
breaking up
the UNIX trademark and code which was what precipitated SCO's assumption
that
they could sue Linux for copyright infringement.

If Novell had not existed, it is difficult to predict what would have
happened. USL would
definitely have been sold. But, likely to a much more Unix-friendly company
(like Sun)
which had a long history with Unix, and which also would have understood the
issue
and probably told the lawfirm to immediately drop the suit. It would have
also been
highly likely that USL would not have been broken to bits and the acquiring
company
would have continued to manage the SYSVR5 source as AT&T had done.

That would have helped the commercial Unix market I think as it would have
helped to continue to maintain a single consistent commercial Unix codebase.

Under those conditions Linux might have been stillborn. But, all of the
other Unix
applications you named would have probably happened on BSD as well as being
compilable under commercial Unix. It would also have likely helped keep SCO
viable.

The real answer I think lies in the answer to the question "why do people
use
Linux or FreeBSD instead of Microsoft?"

At one time the answer was that because the open source stuff worked OK
but was far, far cheaper, so poor organizations that couldn't afford the
Microsoft
stuff would use the Open Source stuff.

Today, the Open Source stuff has become differentiated from the Microsoft
stuff
to the point that it's almost alien. For example people run FreeBSD or
Linux
webservers because they want to run PHP, while they run Windows webservers
because they want to run ASP. You can't really move a PHP app to a Windows
server and you can't really move an ASP app to a Unix server without more
work
that is worth doing than just remaining on those platforms. In short, the
decision
to run one or the other has nothing to do with which one works better, it
has
everything to do with one platform offers one set of interfaces, the other
platform
offers a different set of interfaces.

So, if your coming from the position that people use the open source stuff
because it's cheap, then the answer to your question regarding Novell is
probably nothing would be any different because the users would be using
the open source stuff anyway.

If your coming from the position that people use the open source stuff
because
it does what they want, then you would probably argue that without Novell's
interference with USL, that open source today would be much closer to
a commercial model - such as MySQL has, with a dual code tree. Depending
on what your doing with open source, that might be a whole lot better for
you.

Ted