Summary: A reader's comments on Novell's latest deeds and some other interesting items from this week's news

Regarding an issue that we mentioned before (a few hours ago), one reader wrote to say that "Novell tries to undermine Red Hat support customer base."

"I just have come up with a piece of news in Spanish," he writes, "but with a letter in English from Red Hat. Probably you already have dealt with it in your site but I am sending it to you just in case...

"Every day Novell behaves more and more as a full subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. Since they got the money injection from MSFT they behave like those zombie caterpillars that have been inoculated the wasp's eggs (don't watch the video at lunchtime).

“Every day Novell behaves more and more as a full subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.”
      --Anonymous reader"On the other hand, it is something similar to what Oracle tries to do with their RHEL clone "Unbreakable Linux", only they at least changed the logo and had some other product that was the true drive for customers asking for support under GNU/Linux (their proprietary database software)

"Let's not forget that those corporations (Novell, Oracle, Microsoft) whose core business is privative software are not (and won't ever be) friends of software freedom. It is a shame that Novell got to acquire SuSE Gmbh. (I used to love SuSE Linux back in the days when it was developed an independent free software company)"

In other news this week, Novell tells the India Times that it's a "mixed source company" when asked a simple question: "What’s Novell’s vision of open source?"

From this article:

After its joint patent agreement with Microsoft in 2006, open SUSE maker Novell developed a lot of rivals in the open source community globally.

Novell, which itself develops products based on the Linux kernel, now says its vision is to be a ‘mixed source’ company focused on core engineering products. Maarten Koster, president Asia Pacific, of Novell, talks to ET, about how rival Sun Microsystem’s buyout by Oracle is going to benefit Novell and of course the future of open source software businesses.

[...]

What’s Novell’s vision of open source? Is it okay to exit a business or region, if it does not suit your corporate vision?

We are a mixed source company. Though we provide open source and open platform enterprise operating systems and software, we like to call ourselves a heterogeneous company. If I gaze the crystal ball, I don’t see open source software killing proprietary software business or vice versa in future. Both will continue to exist. And it’s the customer who will make them work together.

Novell UK is in a terrible shape these days (disarray even, following the departure of many managers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]). Watch the following gem from this week's news: (also here)

Way back when I was running technical support for the likes of Novell UK our customers had no way to get connected unless it was at a tradeshow or a local user group meeting and even then it wasn't a really "close" connection.

Novell is said to be "Bleeding to Death", so its actions against Red Hat are probably just acts of misery. ⬆

"Now [Novell is] little better than a branch of Microsoft"

--LinuxToday Managing Editor