I may have been curious at the time why Novell packaged SLES11 the way they did, but in the end, I’m a pretty happy customer and we’re rolling out SLES11 across our entire formerly OpenSuSE, BSD, and Solaris infrastructure.

Historically, linux has had very poor documentation. The High Availability project (Linux-HA, aka Heartbeat) is a great example. Between Pacemaker, Heartbeat, and OpenAIS, it’s difficult to figure out how to deploy these things in a way that works. One of the beautiful things about SLES11 now that I’ve spent some time swimming in the cool-aid is that things are documented so that the old gray haired Netware guys will adopt them… they’re used to having 300 page manuals. And Novell will even support ‘odd’ or ‘incorrect’ configurations while they help you get their products deployed … instead of saying “See this knowledge base article, fix these problems, and call us back when you have a supported configuration.”

Novell’s documentation is very good, and their staff is making huge contributions to the linux clustering projects and they’re making it easy for everyone to use, from young command line jockies like me to the old grayhair that I’m learning the intricacies of Groupwise from. This is an essential service to the linux community. For parallels, look at Zend and PHP, IBM and it’s contributions to SuSE, all the code that Sun’s released into the public domain, and … well, the list goes on. All those companies also work with Microsoft.

The license terms for our educational institution are very nice, and Novell has worked hard to integrate our distributed infrastructure and get us all using the same set of license keys and the same site licenses where they make sense, even though our campus is spread across an entire state and some groups have purchased extra products or gone through different sales channels. Other companies (Among them: Redhat, Atlassian, and Microsoft) have knowingly sold multiple site licenses to the same site for the extra money and refuse to refund it when someone does their homework and finds that there’s already a site license paid up.

I’m not really a rabid fan or huge disliker of anything, but Microsoft plays rough and has a crummy product that they charge dearly for. Everything that I see about Novell is exactly the opposite of Microsoft.

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[1] http://boycottnovell.com/2009/03/25/microsoft-hires-federated-media/
[2] http://boycottnovell.com/2009/03/12/microsoft-astroturf-roundup
[3] http://boycottnovell.com/2009/03/11/patricia-fernandes-vs-magalhaes-linux/

The “dodgyness” continued when another staff member piped up to defend and help Chaks (as happened before) and they went down the trademark routine of trying to insult me when they didnt have a counter argument. This resulted in one of the reporters (who I believe would like to be taken seriously) making a remark about tin hats. (which you would think was coming from the owner of a fanboy gaming site, not a site which appears to want people to take it seriously)

Chaks called me a FOSS lover, which is a lie and I challenged appropriately. Theres plenty of proof in my previous posting that I dont champion FOSS for the sake of it, I champion decent software which gives the end user freedom. I only challenge underhanded tactics and dubious posting along with the silly and incorrect facts that usually accompanies it.

Im still waiting to hear about the feature OpenSUSE is offering Chaks which cant be achieved elsewhere. Somehow I doubt we will ever get an answer (unless of course another distro producer signs up with Microsoft, then Im sure that one will aswell.)

BTW Roy, did you notice my challenging of a Twitter user called Optionetics? They were promoting Microsoft stock almost exclusively and after further investigation and challenge it transpired that they were actually imposters, using the name of an innocent company to try and appear legitimate.
The real company (as a result of my challenge) made a complaint to Twitter and the account has been disabled. Optionetics actually is a Stock market education company and does not give out stock tips ever.
I wonder what the imposters motives were for promoting MS stock under a false name? Could there be a nasty shock instore for shareholders when the next set of sales figures are released? Ill let your readers decide what the motives could be.

Great site, as always Roy. Happy holidays.
Goblin.