Novell vs. Microsoft, Gnome 1.x removal, cokehabit and stuff, 14-21 Nov 2006
Well, the day for weekly stuff.
There are few things are going on. Some of them Gentoo, some are not, so lets get started:
- I would start with Novell-Microsoft deal. Albeit not news anymore, this one caused a lot of stirring in FOSS community. If you have missed the deal, then in a nutshell: Novell will pay ~40M $ to Microsoft, and Microsoft will pay something to Novell. What is it for we do not know, but it will allow Novell to claim idemnification for its clients from MS, and also MS already started telling that Novell pays for Microsofts' intellectual property used in Novell Linux products. While intriguing where will this thing go, I really don't think its a good idea for any linux distro to pay for "intellectual property" which is possibly used in Linux based OS. And I agree on this with Red Hat's people, saying to Steve Ballmer, "show us the violating code, and it will be removed".
- Gnome 1.x removal caused more hateful fan-mails than even xmms procedure. Which is strange, especially because of xmms removal issue. I noticed plans to remove Gnome 1.x and friends couple of weeks before, and all that despite the fact that I occasionally visit forums. I mean, that somehow information did came to me, so I don't understand how people pissed by xmms removal do not pay attention to what is happening, and then complain again about Gnome. Thats childish and unfair, BUT I do understand their behavior.
Besides giving notification, or in addition, some other kind of warning/notification system may need to be developed to announce such things. But people should also cool their spirits and try and understand both sides - understand developers why do they decide to retire packages (trust me, its not to screw you for fun), and understand users that do not enjoy dealing with removal problems. - Finally!! User representatives meeting had place last weekend, and it was very cool to catch up will all of them missing in action (yes, there was some timeout as it seemed). Loki99 suggested to have a long meeting in 3-days span, which came out really great. Some of the things that were discussed were CMS system for gentoo-userreps.org (which is not very operational at the moment), and also my ideas about userdays and video docs.
I really like hanging around those guys, they are very cool. And I have an opportunity to learn a lot there. - cokehabit was demoted as userrep. I can't (and won't) get into the details why did it happened, enough emotions get around this one as it is. I hope that userrep project will still do great and that users and developers will benefit from it.
That's why, by the way, Jonathan Schwartz said all those things about OS importance. He just reacted to this deal....
Feedback is always appreciated
2 comments:
This is the second time I read about cokehabit "leaving" or at least "no longer being in" userreps.
I think the userreps project is a really important one for gentoo and the way it's gonna develop in the near future, so that kind of stuff interests me: Will we get some information what happened or lead to this?
If something went wrong maybe it should be made public to ensure it will not happen again.
Well, yes.
Userrel (which is userreps parent project) will issue the statement.
I beleive it will explain the reasons for this in satisfactory manner.
And yes, as I said in the post I do believe that a userrep project is very important and if there are problems with it they should be reoslved.
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