5Nov
Sun2006 | MS/Novell deal, part 3: positive things
Now I'm going to be subversive and say nice things about the
MS/Novell deal
- Everyone who codes OSS out of hours, for non profit goals, can
infringe any MS patent they like. That doesn't make software
patents any better, but that even if you are aware that you
infringe an MS one, you can be free to infringe it. Wheras if you
have a web site selling things online, you don't know that once IBM
have got Amazon out the way, they will not turn their attention to
you.
- It keeps SuSE in the game. Apart from the complete disaster
that was SuSE 10.1's update manager, it is a stable distro, with
good testing
- SuSE is a KDE house, not Gnome. Now back in Gnome-land, I find
its assumptions about my stupidity even more patronising than much
of Windows. Both are trying to dumb down. This doesnt mean I dont
like clean apps like gedit and gterminal, it's just the whole thing
treats me like I don't know what I'm doing. It's as if they decided
the weakness of Unix was its suitability for power users, not a
strength.
- YaST is a good admin too. It makes the admin apps of Gnome look
poor. If Novell add a WS-Management API to it, it means that you
will be able to use WS-Management to manipulate the system state of
a SuSE installation. Is that good? Yes, very. If I get round to
doing a WS-Management bridge for SmartFrog, it means we could
control every aspect of a SuSE platform when we bring up a
virtualized image, without having to edit all the various config
files one-by-one.
- Having multiple 'enterprise' Unix distros may be a good
thing. It certainly encourages timely releases of new versions.
Look how many linux releases there have been in the five years
since winXP came out.
- It puts price pressure on RedHat, as does the Oracle deal. An
MSDN Universal subscription costs less than an RHEL subscription
for a single system, and that gives me the right to install many
many version of windows, ISS, SQL server, Visual Studio across a
whole set of machines.
- Virtualization. Presumably Xen and Windows will get
WS-Management support too, and perhaps Windows will be made
available in a Xen-friendly form, Windows-Vista-Xen-edition.
- If SuSE stay in business, OpenSuSE remains around to show up
Fedora as a bubble of instability.
- It may improve the quality of Mono. There are Ant tasks for
.NET support, but Mono is troublesome as they dont behave they
same. They aren't even consistent with the command line, even
when they say they are. Now, while I am not enamoured of Mono,
it is now free to implement Xaml, ASP.NET, all the other bits of
.NET on windows that is not covered by the ECMA C# spec/patent
grant.
- It remphasises that Linux/OSS is still a threat to Windows, and
that the forthcoming shipping of Vista isn't going to make it go
away.
Now, where can I find a VMware image of Solaris to play
with?
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