Warning, poachers on the loose

Sam Varghese
Monday, 27 November 2006 02:11

Opinion and Analysis

Is it right for free and open source projects to capitalise on the dissatisfaction created by the Microsoft-Novell deal and try to attract developers who work for Novell to jump ship?

Mark Shuttleworth, the owner of Canonical, the company that runs the Ubuntu GNU/Linux project, apparently thinks so. In a post to the OpenSUSE mailing list, Shuttleworth has issued an open invitation to those who are "concerned about the
long term consequences of this pact" to take a look at the activities being organised this week as part of the Ubuntu Open Week.

"We are hosting a series of introductory sessions for people who want to join the Ubuntu community - in any capacity, including developers and package maintainers," Shuttleworth writes. "There are a couple of sessions that would be particularly interesting for folks familiar with OpenSUSE."

OpenSUSE, by the way, is SUSE's community build of its GNU/Linux distribution. It is an idea copied from Red Hat who started the Fedora project a couple of years ago.

Shuttleworth told the OpenSUSE developers that if they were interested "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."

The last bit of his post tried to justify his invitation. "I know that posting this message to an OpenSUSE list will be
controversial," he wrote. "...That said, I think the position taken by Novell leadership in their contract with Microsoft is hugely disrespectful of the contributions of thousands of GPL programmers and contributors to SuSE, and I know that many are looking for a new place to get involved that is not subject to the same arbitrary executive intervention."