watch and wait, Novell is M$’s bitch, they may as well cozy up to Corel and start kissing and playing patty cake.

Here is a reaction to this which I’ve received by E-mail moments ago:

“My first response was yet another sick at the stomach feeling of oh, no, not again. My second feeling was, “can Novell *possibly* do anything else to piss of the FOSS community?“.

It does make me feel a little bit numb. But I am just hoping that they are offering this service to take business away from Microsoft. One of the things that I have long believed after listening to a 1.5 hour podcast of a panel discussion with the parties for M$ and Novell is that there is more competition than cooperation between M$ and Novell. It was clear to me from listening to that discussion that both Novell and Microsoft have two teams to address their “collaboration.” The first team tries to persuade the customer to abandon Microsoft (in Novell’s case) or Novell (in Microsoft’s case). Only after those initial teams fail to move the customer does Novell or Microsoft bring in their true collaboration team.“

The copyright is from 2008 (“© 2008 Novell, Inc.”), but this may be a generated page…

[PJ: So... how is this *not* Novell helping Microsoft smother Linux?]

People will hopefully start to realise Novell’s role. It’s inevitable and it’s bound to get worse as Novell gets poorer and smaller (thus more dependent on Microsoft’s love that goes in a single direction).