People's Front vs. Popular Front etc.

Does the capitalist tie-in make S.u.S.E. "Running Dog Linux"?

Just asking, been out of college so long...

Which reminds me:

"Who's the Glorious Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party?"

--Fat Freddy (AKA Frederick Freekowtski)

"Maaaoooo!"

--Fat Freddy's Cat

P.S. I used to like S.u.S.E. because you could go into Borders and walk out with a well-backed, well-packed Linux distro with manual. Now it just seems to be a pawn (or is it stalking horse?) in a much larger game. As for Novell's craven capitulation to (probably vacuous) patent threats, I'm put in mind of a Spike Jones tune. Updating the lyrics was easy, too easy, actually:

Ven Herr Ballmer says, "Ve own ze desktop space"

Ve "Heil!" (boom) "Heil!" (boom) right in Herr Ballmer's face.

Not to kneel to Redmond is a great disgrace,

Zo ve "Heil!" (boom) "Heil!" (boom) right in Herr Ballmer's face!

@BitTwister

Oh dear, touched a nerve did I?

Linux *does* have its niches, in various markets, but to most of the general public and even to most of the IT world it is barely visible. Surely you wouldn't disagree with that? It's a shame, but it has been that way for a very *long* time (in IT terms, where most people view five years as a long time).

I'm well aware of the standards on and around which GNU/Linux is based. For example, I remember POSIX and XPG4, both part of a set of standards which was supposed to enable Unixes to compete on a level playing field for "open standards"-based business (eg US and various other governments), back in the days when "open standards" were trendier than "open source".

I even remember Lasermoon in England who were hoping to be big by being the first POSIX-certified, XPG4-certified, GPL-licenced UNIX-compatible (1) distro. That was back in 1995 or so. They vanished (went bust?) shortly after that, although Caldera (remember them?) bought some of their POSIX and XPG stuff.

I also remember wondering if the Linux Standards Base would have a more visible long term impact than POSIX and XPG4. So, standards, yeah, as the saying goes "the nice thing is there's so many to choose from", and the number of window managers or mail clients or (whatever) a Linux user can pick from certainly illustrates that.

Isn't it funny how there's only one real gcc and one real Linux kernel though? Where standards/compatibility is a requirement needed by the techies rather than an afterthought needed if Joe Public is to get with the program, standards can't be ignored so easily.

Way back in the dinosaur era, Unix was going downhill commercially till the commercial outfits decided the infighting between the System V and the BSD camps was a distraction (what chance is their of writing portable apps to take over the world when the two Unixes can't agree on the syntax for "fd = open( )"? Java's taken off, not because it gives people choices, but because it's (allegedly) a standard.

Etc. Get the drift?

The Windows world mostly just ignores standards unless it suits them ("embrace and extend", remember?). Ignoring standards hasn't hurt MS too much, but the Linux world doesn't have the advantage of being the incumbent monopoly (except perhaps in a few niches such as HPTC and ...), and unless something changes in the way the "evangelists" behave (ie the first few replies here), it'll stay that way. Would these "evangelists" really rather have folks using Windows rather than using a Linux which isn't their own divinely-chosen preferred distro, 'cos that's how the first few replies read to me?

[1] UNIX is a trademark of ... so many different companies I've lost track. And perhaps there's a lesson there too; diversity is good sometimes, but not always.