It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.
Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?
In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed to build a vibrant business, doing north of $90 million at the time of its acquisition by Sun Microsystems in February 2008.
Equally compelling, however, is the exceptional user and developer community that formed around the open-source database project, registering tens of millions of downloads and a massive developer community.
This community augmented MySQL's financial fortunes, of course, but it also protected MySQL database users from the whims of the company, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos wrote to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes:
Even if Oracle for whatever reason would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity - not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.
Unfortunately, the EC seems intent on punishing MySQL--both community and company--for its success. Already the MySQL database project has started to fracture into competing forks, while business rivals like EnterpriseDB and IBM collect confused customers.
More worryingly, the EC's actions may end up diminishing potential returns to investors in other open-source projects, particularly those that take the added time and cost to build global communities.
Technology mergers and acquisitions activity is at a 20-month high. Open-source companies, however, may miss out on this resurgence, particularly those, like Acquia and EnterpriseDB, that build on successful open-source communities (Drupal and Postgres, respectively).
Indeed, based on the EC's actions, perhaps the worst thing these companies could do is foster successful open-source communities. Maybe they should just take the cash and run?
Consider: the EC didn't challenge Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra, VMware's acquisition of SpringSource, Citrix's acquisition of XenSource, etc. What do they have in common? Rising revenue but, except in the case of SpringSource, much more limited communities than MySQL. (Even the Spring community pales in comparison to MySQL, impressive though it is.)
Granted, the major difference with Oracle/MySQL is that the two are ostensibly competitors, as CNET points out. In the letter referenced above, however, Mickos dismisses such competition. The reality is that MySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets.
Regardless, as well as MySQL was doing, $90-plus million is spare change in the global database market. The EC, in other words, isn't trying to protect MySQL's business. It's trying to protect MySQL's community.
Such mollycoddling of an open-source community is destructive to all future investments in similar endeavors. Why should commercial entities bother fostering community--the very community that makes them less susceptible to hostile takeover and anticompetitive forces--if doing so simply ends up ruining financial returns?
The EC means well, but it is not doing the right thing for MySQL, its community, or other open-source commercial efforts. Quite the opposite. Just as the commercial open-source community has been pondering a move back to community-controlled open source, the EC threatens to hobble the shift.
The EC may well end up with less competition, not more, by blocking Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun and its crown jewel, MySQL.
Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.
What, me worry?
It's true that adoption of unpaid Linux like CentOS is booming, and that this no-cost alternative to more expensive solutions like Red Hat is a real threat to Red Hat. This is no doubt why Red Hat has made "free-to-paid" a core element of its ongoing strategy, as related in its recent earnings call.
But it's a much bigger threat to Novell and Oracle, both of whom are trying to position themselves as cheaper alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If a customer really wants Red Hat at a lower price, they're not going to move to an incompatible distribution that may or may not run their applications properly. They're going to jump to CentOS, which is basically a carbon copy of RHEL, minus the trademarks (and price tag).
Oracle, for its part, is clearly not in the Linux market. It's in the market to eradicate Red Hat, so as to claim top-to-bottom control of its software stack. But even as Oracle tries to squeeze Red Hat into oblivion, CentOS provides an excellent hedge against commercial competition from Oracle (and Novell), making its pitch ring hollow.
CentOS: Red Hat's biggest annoyance and greatest friend?
It's not dissimilar to the role that piracy plays for protecting Microsoft's Windows dominance against Linux, especially in emerging markets. Quite possibly the worst thing that Microsoft could do, as IDC has also suggested, is to succeed in its anti-piracy efforts.
Were Microsoft to raise its pricing above $0.00 in such markets, suddenly Linux would look like a much better alternative.
Back to Novell and Oracle. It's not enough to try harder. Red Hat has created a dominant global brand that CIOs trust. It's not worth a few dollars here and there to disrupt that to shift to SUSE or Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Not when those CIOs can shave 100 percent of their RHEL subscription costs by moving to CentOS.
I know some CIOs who have, but they tend to be enterprises with lots of developers that are comfortable supporting themselves. Fortunately for Red Hat, few CIOs care to take that risk. Unfortunately for Novell and Oracle, those who do want to save all of their Linux subscription fees, not just some of them.
Novell reported on Thursday a 22 percent year-over-year increase in its Linux revenue, topping $40 million. That's the good news. The bad news is that overall, net revenue slumped to $216 million from $245 million for the third fiscal quarter of 2008, with every product besides Linux dropping considerably. From identity and security management (down 16 percent) to systems and resource management (down 15 percent) to workgroup (down 12 percent), Novell is in serious trouble, with at least two potential options:
Turn to the open-source community or Microsoft to fix its failing businesses.
Novell's Open Platform business, of which Linux comprises the majority of revenue, has consistently soared for several straight quarters. Though it has had hiccups, Linux has been a factor in Novell's resilience through the downturn. This is either a factor of Novell's commitment to open source or its partnership with Microsoft, or both.
Whichever it is, Novell needs more of it. Now.
Novell's Workgroup business has been underperforming for years now as the company tries to Band-Aid the declining relevance of its once-leading solutions, like GroupWise. It's time to either amputate (sell off assets) or graft new products onto the product line. Companies like Jive, MindTouch (Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch), Open-Xchange, and others could fill out Novell's Workgroup product offering.
Ever the savvy operator, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian was able to steer the company to positive growth in operating margin, but now he needs to turn around the company's revenue story. His contention that Novell's "revenue performance was similar to many companies in the software industry" is certainly not true of Novell's chief Linux competitor, Red Hat, which has thrived through the recession, even despite plummeting semiconductor sales, signaling lower overall demand for the servers and personal computers that fuel Novell's business.
That's not to suggest that everything is rosy at Red Hat. As The 451 Group reports, Red Hat's rate of revenue growth has steadily declined over the past few quarters, requiring it to take some action to kickstart growth.
Fortunately for Red Hat, the market has clearly signaled that it welcomes acquisitions, as its highest valuation in the past five years came on the heels of its JBoss acquisition. Apparently, investors would like to see Red Hat grow beyond its core Linux business.
Back to Novell. The company needs a growth strategy, and it has only found two ways to grow over the past few years: open source and Microsoft. One or the other will do. Novell's current strategy of using Linux as a loss-leader of sorts to promote its separate, proprietary products is not working.
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Even as the recession continues to cool CIO appetites for software purchases, Linux is bucking the trend, according to a new IDC report.
IDC is projecting Linux revenue to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 16.9 percent from 2008 to 2013, topping $1.2 billion in 2013.
As IDC notes, this growth will comprise just 4 percent of total software market revenue by 2013, up from 2.2 percent in 2008. However, for the second time, IDC has also examined nonpaid deployments of Linux, revealing some troubling data.
I've always assumed Red Hat's primary Linux competitor is Novell. And based on IDC's numbers, it does appear that Novell is increasingly a real threat to Red Hat.
But it is the nonpaid usage of Red Hat's software that may well pose a bigger risk.
Novell has 27.9 percent market share of paid deployments and 20.1 percent of the total paid and nonpaid market. This doesn't look so great at first glance; after all, more people use Red Hat (including Fedora) for free than pay for Suse Linux Enterprise Server.
However, in growth, Suse stands out. On paid shipments, Red Hat's 2007 to 2008 growth was 1.9 percent, while Novell's Suse was nearly double that at 3.5 percent.
On revenue, Novell comes in at 29.8 percent market share. That represents 50.3 percent growth in market share, versus Red Hat's 14.8 percent growth. Granted, Red Hat has a much larger base of revenue from which it's growing ($319.5 million compared with Novell's $112.6 million in 2007), but Novell's Linux revenue growth has outpaced Red Hat's since 2007.
I don't particularly like Novell's partnership with Microsoft to promote Linux, but it does appear to be paying off for Novell.
If Red Hat could elect to eliminate one competitor tomorrow, though, I'm wiling to bet that it would not choose Novell's Suse. It would choose unpaid Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which accounts for a big chunk of the overall Linux market.
This may seem trivial, given that Red Hat earned a 62.2 percent share in the overall market for new license paid shipments/subscriptions, measured by deployments, or 64.7 percent, measured by revenue.
Sounds great, right?
Maybe. Intriguingly, Red Hat also claims 28.6 percent of the nonpaid market...for RHEL, its Linux distribution that should only be available to paid subscribers, but which many companies dishonestly use without paying (e.g., they may violate their contract by running more RHEL servers than they actually pay for).
Add Red Hat's paid and nonpaid deployments together, and Red Hat accounts for 47.6 percent of the global Linux market, whether users are legitimate customers or pirates.
It gets better (or worse, depending on your view). If one adds in the RHEL clone CentOS and Red Hat's own community distribution Fedora Core, Red Hat and its offspring dominate the global Linux deployments market with 57.1 percent market share.
This might not be so bad, if the trend were toward more paid Linux adoption, but it's not. While paid Linux server deployments will grow at an impressive rate, nonpaid deployments will grow even faster, nearly reaching parity with paid deployments in 2013.
Why this growth in nonpaid Linux?
Undoubtedly some of it stems from enterprises wanting to get something for nothing. Rather than pay for value, they attempt to cheat the system, leaving less money to help develop Linux.
But it may also be that the longer the world uses Linux, the less it feels the need to pay for it. Noted technology CTO Jon Williams once posed a dilemma to me at the Open Source Business Conference. He indicated that the longer his team works with an open-source project, the less need it has for support and maintenance from a vendor.
In other words, the minute the customer becomes profitable to the vendor is the same minute the customer no longer needs that vendor.
We could be seeing this in Linux. Still, the fact that they seem to be stealing RHEL rather than adopting Ubuntu or another "community-led" Linux distribution suggests that we're seeing enterprise IT attempt to cheat vendors rather than do without them.
All of which may mean that the world increasingly recognizes that Linux is a superior server operating system...and doesn't want to pay for it.
How comforting...and alarming. It's not as if Linux development costs nothing. Red Hat pays over $100 million each year to develop Linux, and it's not the only company making such hefty investments.
UPDATE @ 11:03 PT: For the reading-impaired: When I talk about "stealing RHEL" I'm in no way referring to CentOS or Fedora, as my post clearly states. I'm talking about using RHEL without paying for it. Not CentOS. Not Fedora. RHEL. Red Hat has a fair number of companies that actively underpay on RHEL: that is, companies use more RHEL than they are legally allowed to use as per their contract with Red Hat.
So, please read the post, and don't get worked up by the word "steal" and "CentOS" in the same post. I'm not referring to CentOS or other legitimate uses of Linux. I'm talking about theft of RHEL (which is what IDC is talking about, too. Maybe you should buy the report and read it before commenting so that we can have an informed discussion.
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Microsoft, for all its faults, has significantly lowered the bar to IT development, offering tools like Visual Studio that help make average developers more productive. Linux, on the contrary, has been supercharged with powerful capabilities, but has often required significant experience to harness that power.
In other words, Novell, like Microsoft before it, wants to make technology easy.
Novell isn't alone in this aim, of course. Canonical has made great strides in making the Linux "desktop" intuitive and easy, while Red Hat has been working hard to facilitate Linux-based virtualization and cloud computing.
But Novell's SUSE Appliance Program arguably tackles one of the hardest problems in Linux, and delivers a truly easy experience. I asked Matt Richards, Novell's senior program manager for SUSE Appliance Program, to identify how Novell's strategy differs not only from the other Linux vendors, but also from Microsoft.
His answer is instructive:
We are the only operating system vendor that is focused on making it easy for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to make money from software appliances. The SUSE Appliance Program is designed specifically for ISVs, providing the technical, sales, and marketing capabilities that ISVs need to build appliances, get appliances into the market, and expand their application footprint.
Only Novell allows ISVs to customize a mission-critical operating system--and get full support for that customized OS.
Proprietary operating systems lack the modularity that Linux offers, and other Linux vendors don't have the SUSE Studio Online tool, which enables ISVs to customize their operating system in a matter of minutes. When you add the technology to our distribution partners like TechData, we offer a unique value proposition that helps ISVs expand their market opportunity.
It's hard to overstate the importance of Richards' comment about "full support," as I've noted before. It's hard enough to enable customization if you're a vendor, but then to support those customizations? Brutally difficult.
And yet that is what Novell is doing, with a host of ISVs already signed up in support.
Novell has demonstrated that it can cut prices, as it has with IBM on mainframes. That's great for enterprises, but the big cost for ISVs is development, which Novell's SUSE Appliance Program should go a long way toward reducing.
This is a bold move by Novell, and great for the industry. Novell's SUSE Studio Online sends a shot over the bow of proprietary software tools, pushing the envelope on innovation. Try finding something as good as SUSE Studio Online for Windows, Unix, etc. (Spoiler: you won't.)
Novell SUSE Studio Online - screenshot
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Red Hat has taken heat over the past few years for allegedly neglecting the personal computer in favor of more profitable enterprise servers. It's a fair critique: Red Hat is an enterprise software company, a decision it made years ago, and to good effect.
But anyone thinking that Red Hat has somehow forgotten consumer markets in its rush to win the enterprise need only try the final release of Fedora 11, its community-focused operating system for desktops and laptops. I've been evaluating Fedora 11 for the past week and find it polished and professional while meeting or beating Windows in key performance areas.
Reading through Fedora 11's feature list, the geek in you may get giddy seeing the use of ext4 as the default file system. Not me. I don't care about the underpinnings of the operating system. I just want it to work.
This is, in fact, Fedora 11's biggest selling point: it just works. And fast, too: from powering on to logging in takes 20 seconds or less. Beat that, Windows!
(Ironically, if Windows hopes to catch Linux in boot-up performance, it's going to have to turn to Linux, like DeviceVM's Splashtop, for help.)
This, however, is an experience I've been having with several Linux distributions, including Moblin Beta 2, Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (reviewed here), and OpenSUSE 11.1. While none is perfect, the same is true of my preferred Mac OS X and Windows (Vista or XP). They all work, with little or no fiddling required.
In fact, as an experiment I've been leaving my Linux-based Netbook around the house and have given my children and wife free rein to use it whenever and however they want. My wife looks up actors on IMDB. My daughter writes a school paper. Not one of them has struggled to perform these basic tasks, set up the wireless, etc. Everything just works, and works in a way very familiar to a Mac or Windows user.
This is the state of "desktop" Linux today: it really has nothing left to prove. It took years to become user friendly, but it has arrived, helped along by the world's move to browser-based computing. At this point, the only thing that Fedora and the other Linux distributions can do is embrace and extend the Windows or Mac computing experience, because they've largely matched them (especially Windows).
Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has targeted the Mac as the "desktop" operating system to beat, with plans to do just that.
In fact, my only real complaint with Fedora 11 is that it doesn't yet have a Netbook-focused "spin." I'm not alone in seeking a "Fedora Netbook Remix," but Fedora Mini, as it's called, is not yet ready for prime time.
In the meantime, yes, Fedora 11 provides support for cross-compiling Windows applications directly on Fedora Linux using the MinGW environment, and yes it provides the latest and greatest in open-source software like Firefox 3.1 for Web browsing.
Just don't expect it to be weird/geeky anymore. Those days for the Linux "desktop" are gone. It still needs some spit and polish but, again, so does Windows. The Mac is the closest any 'desktop' operating system gets to being both beautiful and super user friendly. Linux, however, if Fedora 11 is any indication, isn't far behind.
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While Microsoft has been advising open-source vendors not to focus on price as a primary competitive differentiator, the big Linux vendors--Red Hat, Novell (SUSE), and Canonical (Ubuntu)--apparently haven't received the memo. A quick look at their Web sites suggests that the Linux vendors want chief information officers to have their price tags top of mind.
Red Hat:
Novell:
Canonical:
And even Oracle, which usually doesn't paint itself as the low-cost leader, is making the pitch:
Microsoft's Windows Server revenue is down 29 percent. Meanwhile, Novell's and Red Hat's Linux businesses are thriving.
Maybe the Linux vendors know something that Microsoft doesn't?
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Red Hat is an open-source company, while Novell is not, as Novell's CEO and CFO both emphasized in Novell's most recent earnings call. Sun, for its part, was desperately trying to reinvent itself as an open-source company, but struggled to do so given the weight of its declining hardware businesses.
Only Red Hat has managed to thrive as an open-source company while achieving significant scale of revenues.
Open source, it turns out, proves to be a much easier business strategy for upstarts than incumbents: it's hard to thrive on open-source prices unless your business is architected from the ground up to do so.
No incumbent technology vendor yet has managed to successfully transform itself into an open-source player, though Sun has tried, and sometimes to very good effect, as its vice president of Lifecycle Marketing, Zack Urlocker, has written.
Novell, for its part, fits the description Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady proffers for Sun:
...[A]s much as Sun's ambitions were to sell to a volume audience, its execution in that respect never matched its aspirations and it was therefore disproportionately punished by the high end slowdown....
[Sun is a ] pesky upstart...saddled with big company obligations in headcount and real estate.
To both Sun's and Novell's "burdens" we could add "saddled with legacy, proprietary businesses."
This is Novell's albatross, one that weighs down every effort it makes to find a renewed brand and resurrected corporate fortunes.
Hence, as much as Novell might like to focus on growing its open-source business in SUSE Linux, it's forced instead to dump resources into legacy businesses like its sagging Workgroup product line, using SUSE as a mere loss-leader for more profitable (but uninteresting) products like ZENworks.
Not convinced? See this statement from Novell CFO Dana Russell in the company's most recent earnings call. Russell calls out the fact that Novell's Linux business has required "heavy investments" while incurring significant "losses," but suggests that Linux losses are worth it because they can lead to proprietary upsell opportunities:
I think we have been fairly aggressive with pricing and we have been over the last couple of quarters here sort of sent a message that has been we are willing to do what it takes especially in our open source and within the Linux products. That particular set of products is an avenue to generate more customers and the opportunity for us to sell our other proprietary products on top of them.
So from that standpoint, if you look at our model, and our model is really is different than Red Hat's model, Red Hat's model is an open-source model.
Indeed. The problem for Novell is that this strategy, which started back when i was still with the company in 2003, has never really worked. While I agree that some mixture of "proprietary" value-add and open source is critical to ensuring community and corporate success, I believe Novell has approached open source in the wrong way, though its strategy is understandable given the legacy it continues to have to service.
Red Hat agrees. In its most recent earnings call, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst called out that even in Novell's competitive Linux business, which Novell has been discounting to free to win deals, Red Hat still largely wins.
What about Sun? Now that Sun will be part of Oracle, I doubt we'll see Oracle perpetuate Sun's "adoption-led" business model--albeit one that differs from Novell's because it's meant to lead to paid open source, not paid proprietary--because Oracle has its hands more than full cross-selling into all the accounts it has picked up through its acquisitions of Sun, BEA, etc.
At some point Oracle will need the efficiency of open source as a sales model (as may Microsoft, which keeps getting battered by the economy), but I think we're a ways from that day.
Which leaves Red Hat as the only pure-play, public open-source vendor on the planet. it is the only public company that views open source as the core of its business, rather than as a complement. IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, and Oracle all view open source as a valuable complement, to differing degrees.
Red Hat stands alone. Again. So far, it's paying significant dividends. It will be intriguing to see what happens next.
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Ron Hovsepian, CEO of Novell
(Credit: Matt Asay/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian kicked off Open Source Business Conference 2009 here on Tuesday, highlighting Linux momentum, even as the economy craters.
Despite some negative news in its recent earnings announcement, Novell's Linux business has been growing by roughly 30 percent every quarter.
Importantly, Hovsepian discussed innovations that Novell has released in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 that make Linux the engine of a bold move into the data center and beyond.
Hovsepian highlighted some recent analysis from IDC suggesting that Linux and open-source software will continue to grow through the recession, but he emphasized that this growth isn't solely driven by open source's superior cost proposition. Open source also provides a compelling value proposition, even as it drives virtualization and cloud computing, two areas in which Novell is investing heavily.
Even as Linux booms, however, Hovsepian highlighted IDC data suggesting that it won't fully blossom without interoperating with the existing Windows world:
- Forty-nine percent of customers surveyed said Linux will be their No. 1 operating system for new server deployments within five years;
- Sixty-seven percent rank interoperability between Linux and Windows as a top concern.
Novell believes that the data center can and must extend beyond the four walls of an enterprise, and its newly released SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is positioned to grow Novell within and beyond the data center. Enterprises must connect the future of cloud computing to their past legacy investments, which comprise up to 70 percent of any data center.
Enterprises are also increasingly looking to build private clouds, disaggregating the operating system and database from the company's physical hardware, while connecting to public clouds like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to add resources on-demand.
Not surprisingly, then, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is designed to run in each of these environments, making it easy to manage computing workloads.
Before the show, I asked Justin Steinman, Novell's vice president of solutions and product marketing, why enterprises should choose Suse Linux over Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Steinman's response? Interoperability. Steinman notes that while Red Hat has announced its own interoperability deal with Microsoft, it's fairly light. Novell, for its part, has done work with Microsoft to ensure that Microsoft technologies such as ActiveDirectory and System Center work alongside Linux deployments.
Steinman also suggested that ubiquity separates Novell from Red Hat:
We've got preloads with a range of (original equipment manufacturers) for Netbooks, notebooks, Net tops, desktops, and more. Because Linux has such a small footprint, you can get the full functionality of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on a Netbook: Windows can't do that, and Red Hat doesn't have that range of deployments, either.
Try running Suse on your Netbook: we've made no compromises. You can get full functionality like OpenOffice and Webcams on a tiny Netbook. It's pretty powerful.
I like this technical differentiation that Novell is increasingly developing to compete with Microsoft and Red Hat. Novell's history is one of technological innovation, and it's starting to revisit that innovation. It's very, very good to see.
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The U.S. Constitution makes a point of guarding against tyranny through a series of checks and balances. The software market, it turns out, is no different.
Or, rather, it could turn out to be that way. Windows has stood alone for more than a decade as the dominant operating system for personal computers, and it had a growing lock on the server too. But then Linux happened, and Apple's Mac OS X is increasingly spoiling the Windows party (though some recent data suggests that Microsoft's "I'm a PC" marketing may have actually paid off).
Linux provides an effective check on Microsoft's ambitions to own the operating-system market. The question then becomes: how many Linux distributions is optimal for keeping Microsoft honest?
Paul Rubens at ServerWatch makes a compelling argument that one Linux is better than many for the purpose of keeping Windows in check, and the clear candidate to take that mantle is Red Hat, not Novell's Suse Linux. He explains:
Some might say SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) is the obvious candidate in that it's backed by Novell, and with other strings to its bow, Novell should be better able to withstand any price wars or other financial problems a Linux champion might encounter. But there's a problem with this argument. Over the years, Novell has comprehensively had its (rear) whipped by Microsoft. What it comes down to is this: Microsoft is a winner while Novell is a perennial loser.
But it gets worse. Novell, as we all know, is in Microsoft's back pocket when it comes to SLES. The Redmond giant subsidizes SLES by buying support coupons off Novell (it's committed to up to $340 million worth so far), which it uses to get Microsoft customers who are interested in Linux to spurn Red Hat.
Novell, in other words, is not a good counterbalance to Microsoft, because it's somewhat dependent on Microsoft. The VAR Guy rightly suggests that a strong showing by Novell's Suse Linux is critical to ensuring that Red Hat doesn't become Redmond, but this point is mitigated by Novell's affiliation with Microsoft.
Red Hat, however, has not actively taken the fight to Microsoft, and it needs to expand its solution footprint in order to effectively compete with Microsoft. Microsoft is much more than an operating-system company. Red Hat has started to build out its portfolio with JBoss, but more is needed.
Once Red Hat lives up to its brand and expands its range of offerings, we'll have a real competitor to Microsoft, rather than the Unix-and-BEA-replacement company that Red Hat largely is today. As for keeping Red Hat honest, I suspect that Canonical's Ubuntu will play that role, rather than Novell. Novell needs to shed its too-close affiliation with Microsoft in order to effectively counterbalance Microsoft and Red Hat.
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