MS Novell Deal

It’s been around for quite sometime, yet I haven’t found the best way to express my unpleasant feeling on it. Finally, I found a nice and insightful comment on slashdot which also represents my feeling. Kudos slashdotter.

Okay, regarding the deal it self, basically I also believe that it really piss the community at large. As quoted below:

Let’s not beat around the bush on this. Your actions reek of the proprietary and closed mindset–not open source. It is clear this is a deal meant to benefit you first and foremost. While your customers may (or may not) benefit, the community at large seems to be left pissing in the wind. This is profoundly confusing since the vast majority of the Linux product you purport to protect has been written and continues to be written by that community and not your engineers.

And regarding to the interoperabilty that may benefit the community from this deal, let’s read more quote:

Like I said, Microsoft has access to all of the Linux code AND all of the Microsoft code.

Microsoft can open any spec it wants, whenever it wants.

Any other talk about “interoperability” is pure bullshit.

As I can remember, MS has joined the ODF Initiative, yet they come out with their own Office XML. ODF wasn’t good enough as I can remember what they said. Anyway, the last two lines of the quote sums it all.

PS:

I’m sorry for any hurt feeling on you MS lover