Here is blow by blow account of trouble that brewed up on the second day of National Conference on Free Software 2008 in Cochin university. The activists put up posters against the Novell Corp (the main sponsor of this event) at the Free Software exhibition complex.
The organisers called up Kochi police and man handled Anivar Aravind a former student of the Cochin University and a well known free software activist.
Can check the images at
Boycott Novell Protesters Man-handled at National Conference on Free Software 2008 | Playing With Sid
That’s a classic case of fanatiscism… No further explentations needed. Novell is allowed to make deals with whomever they like, even if it’s the Devil himself. The GPL does not prohibit these things and has little to do with how a company runs its business. The only requirements is that you respect the GPL license, which Novell perfectly does. As long as Novell does that, they can strike as many deals with the Devil and his followers as they please. MS will certainly never stand up and sue Linux users/companies because the Linux world is a multi-billion market and if they do that, they will run out of lawyers as other heavyweights who have invested lots of $$$ and time into Linux (IBM, SGI, Sony, Red Hat, etc etc) will bring so many lawyers that it will darken the sky above MS’ headquarters… Surely MS doesn’t want to get into that…
A few fanatic ****s like this one will only damage Linux and its reputation. They think that by “boycotting” Novell it will make a difference, but the only outcome of this is that others like MS will point and laugh at all the Linux silly wars and bickering. Linux is not a religion (or maybe to the fanatics it is). It is just an operating system like many others, and it is not better or worse than any of them. It can do its job well in many areas but can also badly fail in certain, just like any other OS. It has its strong and weak points.
Fanatic ****s like this one have to understand that MS is a reality and sooner or later someone will have to deal with them, whether you like it or not. The whole computer industry is built on top of Windows as the dominating OS and you can’t just ignore that and pretend like it doesn’t exist. Companies who have invested a tremendous amount of time and money over the years in Windows and now want to also include Linux into their infrastructure can’t just ignore their privious investment in Windows and ditch every piece of MS software or inhouse written one. What Novell did is strike a deal with MS to make its Linux distro more interoperable with Windows, and this is a huge benefit to those who primeraly run Windows infractructure and also want to add Linux to it.
I am glad Novell took the first step. If it wasn’t Novell, someone else would have done it, and these fanatic ****s will be bashing it as much as they do on Novell.
microchip8, I could not agree with you more.
These fools must not be supported in any way they have an agenda that bodes ill for the
computing community. These are the types that spend their time writing nasty things like spyware trogans et al. I am a freedom loving person but I do not have the freedom to go into somebody elses house and start handing outfliers and causing a disturbance. this is what these fools did. The Nazis used this tactic and the bolshevics did too
also imho politics has no place in our community
the problem is that these boycott trolls simply do not understand the deal with microsoft. And in such, are the threat to opensource, etc. Good job to those who man-handled them. You don’t go to these events to protest your inability to understand something that has vastly benefited the linux community. The fact that Microsoft sells enterprise certificates have made companies realise that linux is worth using since microsoft are involved with it.