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

["Terrell Prudé Jr."]

Petre Scheie wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 11:02 -0600, Petre Scheie wrote:
>>
>>> --and GPL3 is being modified to prevent deals like the one between
>>> Novell & MS, 
>>
>> Errr... GPL3 can only prevent distribution of GPL3 covered code,
>> not slow down anything else.  I'm not sure why anyone wants
>> that to happen.
>>
> Allison resigned because while the deal may not violate the letter of
> the law, it does violate the intent of it; that's why Samba will move
> to GPL3 in the next release. I expect other projects will do likewise,
> though certainly not all.  Linus has said he thinks GPL3 is a bad
> idea, so the kernel may not be moving; OTOH, I *think* I recall
> reading somewhere that he also said that if the consensus in the
> kernel community evolves to favor GPL3, then he would go along with it
> (but I could be wrong about that).
>
> So, in a year, say, Novell will be stuck with the last version of GPL2
> Samba. Either they don't get a new version or they fork it themselves,
> and it's not clear they have the resources to handle that.  How many
> other projects that Novell uses in SUSE will move to GPL3?  That's
> what makes Novell's future murky, making SUSE a dubious choice for now.
>

And let's not forget GCC, glibc, bash, and all the other software on
which the FSF owns copyright.  The FSF has made it very clear that
virtually all of that software will be GPL3'd.  Oops, kinda hard to make
a functional distro w/o glibc...or grep...or awk...or sed...unless you
want to port FreeBSD's libc, etc.  Maybe that's what Novell will have to do.

The SuSE distro does have an component of actual danger to it as well. 
When that five-year "no suing" agreement ends, either Microsoft demands
greater extortion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fees, or Microsoft starts going
after SuSE customers.  Novell has a nice, handy-dandy list of all of its
customers, and due to the agreement with MS, it might be easier to
subpoena that list...if MS doesn't already have it.  No, I wouldn't risk
my business--or my district--by going with SuSE anymore.

--TP