[luau] Re: Which Distribution To Go With

[Warren Togami]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 23:33, R. Scott Belford wrote:
> What would happen if, say in 5 years, that Red Hat was acquired by a 
> competitor or underwent management changes that did not embrace the 
> partnership with Fedora.  Would the Fedora name be held by the new 
> company/management, or would it be released to the community?  Is there 
> anything the company could do to inhibit the evolution of Fedora?  I 
> think the project makes obvious sense for Red Hat, and the debian-like 
> philosophy of package development is wise.  I am curious to know how it 
> would withstand a takeover like the Novell purchase of Suse.

Ah... with that kind of possibility, I believe the outraged developers
would fork.  I believe many current engineers at RH would also refuse to
work there if the company suddenly turned evil because the vast majority
of those developers believe in principles above all else.  Unless the
situation dramatically changes, I believe it would be corporate suicide
to betray their engineers and users in this fashion, because NOTHING
stops everyone from moving to the fork immediately.  (Unless they are
forced to sign non-compete clauses in contracts... which itself would be
evil.)

In the case of SuSE, I am guessing they are USED TO being proprietary
and not-so-open, so there is no outrage.

HOWEVER... there are some indications that Novell's recent acquisition
in Ximian is changing this proprietary mindset in a profound way:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84723&cid=7393029
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84723&cid=7393279
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84723&cid=7393585

Perhaps SuSE further puts Novell on the path toward enlightenment.  We
will see.

Warren