Mozilla Thunderbird

[Erik Bågfors]

On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 15:14:55 +0000, Sean Miller <sean at seanmiller.net> wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> 
> >Unless you're the copyright holder, of course.
> >
> >
> Which the mighty Novell make a big point of making on their "About"

A big thing?

"Copyright © 1999 - 2004 Novell, Inc. and Others"

Wow, what a big thing, evil evil, They are trying to take over the
world, run, run away :)

Click "credits" and you'll get a list of 267 people that have written
evolution.  Lot's of them not ximian/novell employes.

I have to say that novell is giving credits in the right way.


> >I know several of the ex-Ximian Novell employees personally. I trust
> >them not to take advantage of the free software community.
> >
> >
> Ah, ex-Ximian employees... my friend Mike from Boston was laid off when
> Novell took over Cambridge Technologies in 2001... his boss turned to
> him and said "we are so sad to lose you, but Novell have said your role
> no longer exists in Cambridge".... so he lost his job.... but they
> extended his notice period constantly, because there was nobody else
> within Cambridge that knew the stuff he did... but eventually the
> management locally (Boston) had to admit defeat, and succombe to the
> Novell Head Office and the fact that they couldn't justify his role...
> nice :-(
> 
> Employees are very disposable, especially in Novell... your ex-Ximian
> people will be kept until their worth, then Novell will exercise their
> copyright on the Evolution project and sack the lot of them....

That sounds like a great way to develop their flagship, sack every
deleloper that has years and years of experience with that product. 
Not going to happen.
 
> ...possibly... but the word "possible" is enough to make me think twice
> before using the product.

Gees,
I'm sure all large corporations have done stuff like that.  I don't
really see the problem.  Do you really think that large companys like
that hasn't fired people? What are you getting at?

The thing is that Novell has to play nice with the linux comunity
because that's getting close to all they got. They are putting a lot
of eggs in one basket.

Novell has done a great job with evolution, mono, ifolder,
ldap-libraries for mono, beagle, suse, nld, etc (even if it was other
people that started all of them).

Fact is, so far Novell hasn't done anything wrong towards the Linux
community.  If they want to be proud of evolution, mono, etc, just let
them.  So far, they have opensourced more applications and hired more
people to work on opensource project than before they bought suse and
novell.

Instead of trying to turn this into a conspiracy therory, let's thank
them for doing a good job!

Evolution is my number one application under Linux right now.  It does
everything I want (and some), is stable, and I use it for several
thousands of emails on several accounts.  It's just a great product.

I'm not worried that they will grab evolution and fork it with
none-gpl stuff.  If they do people will either 1) keep developing a
GPL version of evolution or 2) Use another piece or software.

Sure, novell is not in the Linux field out of unselfishness.  They are
here to make money, so let's help them by showing them that it's
possible by playing nice to the community.


> Novell are ruthless... they're heartless... Mike has not worked in IT
> since 2001... he is now a concert promotor...

Poor Mike, sounds like he wasn't able to find a new job in IT, that's
hardly Novell's fault.

Let's get back to reality.

Regards,
Erik