04.04.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE and Linspire Catchup
There has been relatively little in the news about OpenSUSE, at least over the past week. The project did, however, generate some stories such as the following two profiles/interviews.
The fist one is about Marco Michna of OpenSUSE.
This week we meet #openSUSE IRC supporter, and openSUSE Quality Assurance team member Marco ‘daemon’ Michna in one more ‘People of openSUSE’ interview!
The second is about Jakub Steiner
Independently of how many new application features and fixes a distribution release, doesn’t matter much if the distribution doesn’t look great, and users know it for sure!
So, today we are proud to introduce to the world one of the openSUSE UX members team - Jakub Steiner.
Here is a new mini review of OpenSUSE, but be aware the the writer’s first language is not English, so it’s just a little distracting.
For a change, this week it was Jan-Simon Möller that announced the newsletter of OpenSUSE. It presents another and somewhat different take on this project, mainly comprising announcements.
We are pleased to announce:
Issue 16 of openSUSE Weekly News is out! [0]
In this week’s issue:
* SoC application deadline extended
* People of openSUSE: Marco Michna
* openSUSE Board election proposal
* openSUSE IRC - call for participation
* Calling booth volunteers! LugRadio Live, LinuxFest Northwest
* Packaging Day II - this Friday !
[0] http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/16
Have a lot of fun!
Also among the announcements, there was the discontinuation of OpenSUSE 10.1. Here is the message in full.
[opensuse-announce] Advance notice of discontinuation of SUSE Linux 10.1
Dear opensuse-announce subscribers and SUSE Linux users,
SUSE Security announces that SUSE Linux 10.1 will be discontinued soon.
Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years,
vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 10.1 after May 15th 2008 will
not be fixed any more for this product. We expect to release the last
updates around May 30th 2008.
Please do not confuse SUSE Linux 10.1 with the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10
family of products, these are different products and follow different
policies.
As a consequence, the SUSE Linux 10.1 distribution directory on our
ftp server ftp.suse.com will be moved from /pub/suse/10.1/ to the
/pub/suse/discontinued/ directory tree structure to free space on our
mirror sites. The 10.1 directory in the update tree /pub/suse/update/10.1
will follow, as soon as all updates have been published.
The discontinuation of SUSE Linux 10.1 enables us to focus on the SUSE
Linux and openSUSE distributions of a newer release dates to ensure that
our users can continuously take advantage of the quality that they
are used to with SUSE Linux products.
This announcement holds true for SUSE Linux 10.1 only. As usual, SUSE
will continue to provide update packages for the following products:
openSUSE 10.2
openSUSE 10.3
and
openSUSE 11.0 (currently in development)
for a two-year period after the release of the respective distribution.
Please note that the maintenance cycles of SUSE Linux Enterprise products
and products based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system
are not affected by this announcement and have longer life cycles.
To learn more about SUSE Linux business products, please visit
http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/ . For a detailed list of the life cycles
of our Enterprise Products please visit http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/
and http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/lcSearchResults.jsp?sl=suse
If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please do not
hesitate to contact SUSE Security at <security@suse.de>.
Linspire
We don’t typically bother with Linspire, but recently we have been keeping on eye on it too. It’s mainly just press releases, commissioned by Linspire. As in recent weeks, it’s all about proprietary software from CNR.
“CrossOver Linux provides a software bridge to users as they migrate over to the world of Linux,” said Larry Kettler, Linspire President and CEO. “We are pleased to continue the expansion of our long running partnership with CodeWeavers and make available their products via our CNR one-click download service.”
Linspire is not inherently bad and it’s a shame that Larry Kettler needs to carry the burden of the previous CEO, who fled the company shortly after he had sold out. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.