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Novell States Its Business Case, at Ubuntu's and Red Hat's Expense

"I think the vast majority, and I’d quantify that at about 80 percent to 85 percent, of the open source community actually supports this deal [with Microsoft]."

--Novell's Justin Steinman, making stuff up



Remember the times when Novell ridiculed 'opponents' such as Ubuntu, making all sort of small and subtle implications? As Shane pointed out back then, Justin Steinman gently suggested that Ubuntu is not suitable for the enterprise. Shane said: "Novell’s Justin Steinman went so far as to say that Ubuntu lacked "enterprise quality" support options, making it suitable for the "technical enthusiast" community." He took similar cheap swings at Red Hat.

A long time has passed since then. But here we have a bit of a deja vu. Have a look at the following remarks.

“Frankly, we consider Ubuntu a consumer desktop,” says [Novell's] Applebaum. “When you use Linux in the enterprise, you need to be able to dial 1-800 ’someone’ for help.” Novell’s SuSE Linux team and channel partners are best positioned to offer that business help, Applebaum insists.

And what about Red Hat? “Candidly, we don’t see Red Hat on the desktop,” says Applebaum, before quipping: “But we’re still waiting. We’ve yet to encounter them [in the desktop market].” (Red Hat’s efforts to jump-start things on the desktop have hit snags.)


Justin Steinman joins this show as well. Once again it appears as though Ubuntu's technical support gets ignored (thus perpetuating a myth) and Fedora is treated as inexistent. Novell will find it increasingly hard to give real reasons to choose SUSE. It knows this.

Also see: Novell’s FUD Affinity

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