Comments on: Speaking of Linux and the spirit of open source

Novell has just pronounced its intentions, and they are clearly not good.

[daverosenberg]

Pathetic attempt to be relevant

It is so disappointing and pathetic that this is the path that Novell has taken. At
this point I would prefer less Linux adoption to anyone choosing Suse.

[sprogg2001]

Get off your high horse

Novells employees will not be paid with feel-good-wishes from the FOSS community Novell is a business and is out to make money and SO is Redhat, why bomb-blast them because they market their product and play to their strengths, seriously wake up and realise that this is commercial company that gives a lot back into the FOSS community than most realise.

[Matt Asay]

I agree that Novell gives back a lot

But giving it patent headaches arguably removes most of the good that it does. Helping to stifle open source at the same time that you help it is the wrong strategy for everyone except, perhaps, Novell and Microsoft. This is self-centered move and self-centered marketing that is beyond the pale.

If Novell were to say, "Our Linux and services around Linux are better," I'd be all for that kind of marketing. But muddying *all of Linux* (and, by extension, open source) and then saying, "But ours is pure because we entered into a deal with the company that is trying to kill open source through FUD" is just wrong. But what got me in this podcast is just how gleeful Justin is about the strategy. It betrays anemic understanding of community.

[jsteinman]

The MSFT-NOVL Partnership

Matt, you are right -- I am pleased with the results of Novell's partnership with Microsoft. Our SUSE Linux Enterprise business is up 243% year-over-year for the first three quarters of our fiscal year and that's a good thing. At the Mass TLC event, I made my comments about how well the partnership is working immediately after I had spent five minutes detailing our technical collaboration with Microsoft. There really is factual basis for comment that SUSE Linux Enterprise works better with Microsoft Windows. We've got Novell engineers working with Microsoft engineers on areas like bidirectional virtualization -- the ability to host SUSE as a first-class guest on Microsoft Viridian and the ability to host Windows Server 2008 as a first-class guest on SLES/Xen -- and on areas like directory interoperability, which is the ability to drive Windows Servers using authentication and permissions from eDirectory hosted on SUSE Linux Enterprise. These sorts of technical collaborations do matter to customers, and they are things that other Linux distributions just can't offer. You'll notice in the podcast that I spent very little time talking about the IP components on the relationship, because from the Novell perspective, customers are picking SUSE Linux Enterprise because it does work better with Windows.

Justin Steinman
Director of Marketing, Linux & Open Platforms
Novell

[xenomentat]

Oh Come On...

Pam hates Novell, she loves Novell, she hates Novell, rinse and repeat.

As a VAR, I find that people who have experienced RH's pitiful attempts to provide Windows interoperability are very happy to see progress and committment from Novell/SUSE on this front.

And next week Ubuntu will include some more proprietary code and it'll all be "Whither the GPL" and off to thwack Canonical's conkers, or whatever else happens to get the punditry's attention.

Lighten up, Francis.