[K12OSN] needed: recommendations for Linux flavor with ongoing support

Les Mikesell les at futuresource.com
Thu Jan 4 20:42:33 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 18:32 -0800, Robert Arkiletian wrote:

> The point is, of all the distros out there only SuSE has implicitly
> admitted that it is violating M$ IP by accepting a covenant for it's
> customers that states M$ will not sue them for any IP violations.

That's not at all clear - and Novell has explicitly stated the
opposite. In any case, everyone else is using the same code and
has the same violations if any exist.

> Samba does not violate any M$ IP. M$ wishes it did. We can thank the
> brilliance of Andrew Tridgell for that.

I'm not sure anyone can say that with any confidence, given the
state of US patent law and the number of patents held by MS.  And
no amount of brilliance can work around a patent - that's the point
of having them.

> For M$ it's a
> win-win situation. They get the FUD they wanted plus get the FLOSS
> community to abandon one of the top 3 distros. And for anyone that
> buys the BS that this deal was about creating better interoperability,
> all I have to say is M$ has been hard at work doing it's best to
> thwart Linux-Windows compatibility for a long time.

I think you missed the other half of the arrangement. Novell still
claims rights to the original UNIX code (in spite of SCO's claims)
and MS now includes Services-For-Unix and other things that might
possibly infringe.  It's better for everyone for MS to be able to
use good, well tested designs instead of inventing something worse
and putting it on our networks.

> They hate Samba
> and tried to obfuscate it out of existence. But Tridgell is not
> someone easily obfuscated :)

Samba is really only interesting to someone running Windows anyway.
If the GPL didn't prevent people from distributing all the components
you need together, we might have had some real competition to
windows by now and made it irrelevant.  

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com





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