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

--LinuxToday Managing Editor

Summary: Putting a 'Microsoft tax' on proprietary GNU/Linux is still a priority which Novell perceives as sufficiently worth pursuing, even if it means daemonising Red Hat for sympathy

A FEW MONTHS back we saw Novell masquerading as Red Hat, only to receive/invoke letters of complaint in Spain [1, 2, 3] and then whine about it. Shades of TurboHercules [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11].

Novell's PR people are now complaining about presentation/preservation of facts, which is rather hilarious because Novell is a chronic, pathological liar^*, as it has proven repeatedly over the past few years (Novell rivals SCO and Microsoft for the "liar" status). The post says:

Since November 2008, Novell has offered the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support Program to customers who want to migrate to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from an existing Linux distribution, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

[...]

Novell is deeply committed to the open source community, leading major projects including openSUSE and the Mono project, and providing major contributions to other open source initiatives. We are consistently one of the top corporate contributors to the Linux kernel.

Mono project? That's more of a curse, not a contribution. The same goes for Moonlight. These projects are for Microsoft, not for GNU/Linux. Novell is selling out to Microsoft, promoting Microsoft APIs, and even puts Microsoft code inside the kernel (after it's found to be a GPL violation [1, 2, 3]).

“We have shown based on statistics that Novell's Linux contributions over the years dropped very sharply.”Novell is decreasingly contributing to Linux, to the point where Novell does not contribute to the kernel all that much anymore. We have shown based on statistics that Novell's Linux contributions over the years dropped very sharply. The same cannot be said about Mono and related projects, which merely benefit the paymaster from Redmond.

On the positive side, Novell is up for sale. Novell not only curses Red Hat [1, 2]; It also attacks Ubuntu for example. ⬆ ____ ^* For instance, Novell was lying about Studio being a first of its kind, which annoyed rPath.