[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“The Open Source community has had the opportunity to be
extremely vocal of late. With the Vista launch, and Dell’s
IdeaStorm suggestion box website they’ve had ample chance to flex
their feedback muscles. Still neither of these recent events
compares to the sheer outrage that the Microsoft-Novell pact
received last year. But as Novell proved last week, this was an
instance of the community being more loud than correct.“When Microsoft and Novell announced their partnership last year
the OSS community blasted the pact as a deal with the devil,
expressed serious concerns over patent language in the agreement,
and vowed to drop the use of the distribution en masse. Finally,
the outrage reached a crescendo when Samba project lead, Jeremy
Allison, left the company, saying, ‘Whilst the Microsoft patent
agreement is in place there is nothing we can do to fix community
relations. And I really mean nothing…'”