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Raphael @lemmy.world

Read this post by /u/unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org before recommending OpenSUSE during these trying times.

Red Hat is going full evil mode and Fedora, which is largely controlled by Red Hat, is also pushing forward with questionable decisions. At this time, as some Fedora users look for a new $HOME there are many recommending OpenSUSE but before doing this, please read the post below.

Permalink to post: https://lemmy.world/u/unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org

About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux’s growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property and potentially sue them.

As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, “Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation.”

So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for “protection” from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren’t playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.

This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn’t be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer – smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.

In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft’s aggressive behavior a decade earlier.

17 comments

  • It’s good history, I don’t think it really has any bearing today though.

    Novell purchased SuSE Linux AG. Novell signed the agreements, and they were very controversial at the time. Novell was much more involved in the day to day than IBM is at Red Hat, SUSE was not an independent business they were a big part of Novell (the SuSE founder left at one point because of how they ran things, he did eventually return). Novell was later purchased by Attachmate, which made SUSE an independent business unit, both were acquired by Micro Focus. It was sold to EQT Partners in 2018 and operates as an independent business today.

    Novell and today’s company are not the same, they’ve gone through significant changes multiple times, which is maybe a better reason to at least put in some thought.

  • Damn, I wasn't aware of any of that.

    Just when you think Microsoft had already peaked in shady shenanigans, boom, "here's what you missed in the past, buddy"

  • "Let's switch from a company-controlled distro to another company-controlled distro!"

    Personally never used Fedora, but I've learned the lesson you shouldn't trust companies from Ubuntu.

    • Okay when I was considering builds, I was figuring on Mint, but since that's an Ubuntu variant, I take that's a bad idea now?

      • Mint is based on Ubuntu, but it's independent, Canonical can't force them to do anything (and they also have a variant based on Debian).

  • Yeap! That’s most of the reasons why, IMO, we didn’t see the adoption of SUSE like we did with RedHat based stuff.

    I’ve been a huge supporter of RH over the years. After IBM bought them I was cautious but believed that RH would continue mostly the same. Then they killed CentOS. I understood the reasons and the arguments that Stream made sense for them. I was highly annoyed and disappointed with that decision but Rocky showed up and it was okay.

    This final round of fuckery really shows me that the RH we all supported is gone. They burned down nearly all the good will they built up. Locking the source behind a paywall was just the final insult as far as I’m concerned.

    I don’t know how much this will hit their bottom line but I suspect it’s going to have some kind of financial impact just from the number of people like me who used CentOS/Rocky as a gateway to RHEL in prod. I suspect they know and just don’t care.

    With that being said I’m looking at how they react to over the next year or so. If they’re going to be more of an asshat then I’ll start retooling for another distribution. I here nix is pretty good these days…

17 comments