InternetThe Microsoft-Novell Deal and Trust in Princes

Forced to choose, the average Free and open sourced-based (FOSS) business is going to choose business interests over FOSS every time.

"Put not your trust in princes." ~ Psalms 146:3 So Microsoft and Novell are extending their two year old partnership. Is anyone really surprised? Similar, if smaller, deals are announced by other partners on an almost daily basis. The truth is, the deal is not nearly as insightful as the reactions to it in the free and open source (FOSS) community. I'm not talking about the extreme reactions here. On the one hand, you have the market-speak of Novell, which ignores the profound uneasiness that the community has about deals that, in the words of Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, concern "building a bridge between proprietary and open source software," let alone involving a company that is perceived with profound distrust. On the other hand, you have the attempts to muster outrage (and hence page hits) by the semi-professionals who make a career of sorts by alleging all sorts of conspiracies to destroy FOSS -- most of them external to the community, although internal ones will do if necessary. RELATED ARTICLES Is Ubuntu Really the Most User-Friendly Distribution? Debian: 15 Years Old and at the Crossroads For more stories on this topic: For each of these extremes, the extension of the deal was an excuse for dragging out its shopworn rhetoric one more time. But such rhetoric has long ago ceased to be effective. I doubt anyone even listens to it closely any more, outside a handful of true believers --... [ Read more on www.internetnews.com ]

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