Novell SLED on Lenovo Laptops
Here’s another BIG announcement furthering the onward march of Open Source on the desktop:
Lenovo and Novell today announced an agreement to provide preloaded Linux* on Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs and to provide support from Lenovo for the operating system. The companies will offer SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 from Novell® to commercial customers on Lenovo notebooks including those in the popular ThinkPad T Series, a class of notebooks aimed at typical business users, beginning in the fourth quarter of 2007. The ThinkPad notebooks with the Linux-preload will also be available for purchase by individual customers.
There are two big things with this announcement:
- Novell’s SLED is enterprise software aimed at business users. This is different (rather than either better or worse) to the Dell/Ubuntu deal which is far more consumer focussed. This move just adds even more credence to the whole idea that Linux and Open Source are ready for prime-time.
- If Lenovo AND Dell start banging the table of their hardware suppliers for better [and preferably Open Source] drivers, then the whole Open Source community will benefit in long run.
Overall another great news story for Open Source. Here’s the press release in full.
Ha Ha Ha, Hee Hee Hee, I’m a laughing Gnome and you can’t sue me!
Well blow me down with a feather!
It appears as though Microsoft have really shot themselves in the proverbial foot this time….
I found groklaw a few days ago which started out tracking and discussing the SCO vs IBM lawsuit, many years ago – yes it is still on going. [I knew I should have studied law]
I am not a lawyer but the contributors seem to know what they are on about and this latest twist in the tail sounds about par for the course. The “vouchers” which Microsoft bought from Novell to resell as a ‘we won’t sue you if buy Linux with one of these’ pledge have no expiry date! This means, according to Eben Moglen that:
“the minute someone turns in a voucher after GPLv3 is in effect, Microsoft will be granting a patent license to everyone, not just Novell’s paying customers”
Ooops. Or should that be OOo‘ps?
