Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

So, I’m sure everyone’s heard about the Novell/Microsoft thing (Read Eben’s excellent summary of what’s going on and how we’re going to fix it), so this Friday, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux, posted Invitation to OpenSUSE developers.
So, the backlash… Firstly, in response to Mark’s post to the opensuse list, Andreas Johannsson replied:-

It is interesting how everyone in the community seems intent on dividing it,
committing suicide by infighting.
Congratulations, Mr. Shuttleworth. You are doing a fine job of doing
Microsoft’s FUD work for them.

Corey Burger has some interesting thoughts on the subject in which he points out that doing what Mark did is simply not done. Corey has some other interesting background on the binary drivers in Feisty (anyone sensing a theme here?) – the real tragedy is that Mark’s post says “If you have an interest in being part of a vibrant community that cares about keeping free software widely available and protecting the rights of people to get it free of charge, free to modify, free of murky encumbrances and “undisclosed balance sheet liabilities”?, then please do join us.”
A noble goal, but one that ultimately can’t succeed as long as you’re shipping proprietary drivers and asking people to put their bugs into a proprietary system.