We all know about the Novell/Microsoft stuff that is going on and most if not all OSS/Linux supporting people does not agree with it. But Mark, it is not on to use this to try to entice/convince openSUSE developers and community member to join your team. One thing that is so great about OSS is the freedom it allows us to choose. Whether that may be openSUSE, Ubuntu or heaven forbid Windows, we still have that choice and for somebody like you to use things that you do not agree with to entice people to your side is not on.
If the product/solution/service you provide is good enough, then people will come. And I think Ubuntu is good enough to stand on its own legs.
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Well, I don’t agree.
I think shuttelworth was right and did hit, for once, the nail.
The nail being that Suse as a project is doomed because of Novell’s VERY bad microsoftish choices while Ubuntu as a project may (ok: *may*) instead still survive *despite* canonical bad choices (like allowing proprietary binary drivers be installed by default – I hope not).
There’s quite a difference and I think in fact that Suse developers could be MUCH more useful on a debian platform. Note also that there’s an interesting relevant “flow back” from ubuntu to debian, in terms of Linux populace. So a Suse–> Ubuntu–> Debian flow is kosher to me.
My issue is not with whether Suse is doomed or whether Novell did the right thing. In fact I do not agree with what Novell did. And I agree with you that Suse developers might be much more useful on the Ubuntu project but my problem is with the way that Mark went about in this issue.