[huskerlug] Re: A SuSE founder returns
- From: Jim Worrest <jworrest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: huskerlug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 05:44:14 -0600
GreyGeek wrote:
> Martin Wolff wrote:
>> I saw today that Jeremy Allison resigned from Novell today over
>> concerns about the Microsoft deal. So I guess that kinda means Novell
>> breaks even for the day. I wonder if he will move over to the Ubuntu
>> side. The developers were invited by Mark(Ubuntu founder guy) to come
>> to Ubuntu after the Microsoft deal.
The poaching message he left on the SuSE forum, made a very bad
impression on
many people. :-P
>>
>> On 12/21/06, Jim Worrest <jworrest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> An interesting and short article. ---Jim
>>>
>>> http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6962961128.html
>>>
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>>
> Since he resigned from Novell in early November of 2005, commenting
> that it was "/Too late for me. I just decided to leave Suse/Novell.
> This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago./",
> Hubert Mantel seems to have left the planet for the last year. A
> further surprise was revealed when I did a search for "Hubert Mantel"
> and got NO hits on Wikipedia. So, I found the entry for SUSE to see why
> it made no mention of its FOUNDER. It did. The "founder" of SUSE was
> listed as Peter MacDonald.
Peter MacDonald, now there's a good German name for you! ;-) SuSE was a German
creation.
> Other sources say "/Mantel was one of four
> founders of Linux SuSE AG, a German consulting group that focused on
> creating a packaged version of Linux./"
>
> His new "explanation" was that he was "burned out", and he "/simply needed
> some time off./"
> But after a year's absence he says that he realized that he missed
> working on Linux. So, now he's back at Novell as "team leader" of the
> SUSE kernel QA team.
>
> That raises some interesting questions:
>
>
> 1) Novell paid $210M for SUSE. Being a "co-founder" doesn't mean he was
> still a co-owner when Novell bought SUSE. But, assuming he was at least
> a co-owner, how much of that money did Mantel get? At even 1% Mantel
> wouldn't have to work again if he managed his buy out money correctly.
>
Perhaps he's a good German and has a good work ethic? He also may have been
a very poor money manager? You know they aren't all Bill Gates.
>
> 2) Mantel was a Novell executive, "Chief of SUSE Kernel Development".
> Now he is a mere "Team Leader" in the SUSE Kernel Quality Assurance
> team. That is a HUGE step down from executive to a boring and
> repetitive Q&A job. So, did Novell ask Mantel, or did Mantel ask
> Novell?
>
> The difference between working for free and working
> as a "team leader" wouldn't be much if you had gotten any of that
> buyout money. My guesses are that he didn't get and/or save any money
> from the buy out, and that he needed a job so he went back to Novell,
> hat in hand. IF he had money he could have scratched his itch to work
> on Linux with just about any non-commercial distro, for no pay. IF he
> needed money then he needed to work for a commercial distro. The one he
> knows best is SUSE. He asked. That's why he's "for" the Novell/MS deal.
> Otherwise he'd have no job.
>
Now the above is perhaps true, though you don't hear Linus the Linux
inventor saying too much about the deal either.
"Unluckily, when it appeared that openSUSE was about to become the new darling
of the desktop Linux world, Novell concluded a surprising and controversial
patent protection agreement with Microsoft, effectively legitimizing
Microsoft’s intellectual property claims over Linux. The incredulity over this
move was soon followed by an almost universal denunciation of the pact by the
leading members of the Linux community, as well as web sites specialising in
dissecting "lawyer-speak" usually found in such agreements. Despite the outcry
and even calls for boycotting Novell's products, most Linux users ignored the
controversy and went on to download the new product - to find in openSUSE 10.2
a highly polished, innovative and laptop-friendly Linux distribution."
As the latest newsletter put it, they also said are Linux users going to
punish OpenSuSE for what Novell did or should they as it asked in an earlier
newsletter. The answer seems to be "no".
Knoppix did more than any other Linux distro to break the SuSE hold on me. I
got a Dell Dimension 8100 computer when I purchased a Dell laptop of the same
vintage. SuSE 10.2 apparently won't load on it, and Knoppix 4.02 doesn't
either, However Knoppix 5.00 seems to work just fine on it. So,
Knoppix/Debian will be on it besides any SuSE. I'm not going to dump SuSE
(opensuse) or the ReiserFS for that matter, though the latter may get dumped
before SuSE (opensuse) does, especially on any new installation. Debian is a
very workable distribution, when install via Knoppix. 8-) ---Jim
> --
> GreyGeek
>
>
>
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