Summary: The company behind SUSE is spreading Apple's merchandise which does the very opposite of enabling users to preserve their rights

SEVERAL years ago Novell decided to use hypePods as prizes to people who participated in a SUSE survey. Some people criticised/chastised Novell for it (they also did for Novell's extensive use of Flash at the time).

Now, check this thing out. "Don't buy the hype," buy the hypePad, says Novell, which shows once again why it's far from a proponent of Free/open source software.

To thank you for updating us on your plans, we'll enter your name in a drawing for an Apple iPad as soon as you've completed the survey.

[...]

Colleen O'Keefe Novell Senior Vice President and General Manager, Collaboration Solutions and Global Services

Imagine Red Hat doing this...

It's an actual advertisement for the product (hypePad), which they probably get for free just to mention it like that. It's like an endorsement, so it's not just the buying and giving of the unit which is problematic here. Novell could have selected different prizes like $10,000 to do some marketing for more SUSE appliances (so that Novell can brag about SUSE Linux numbers later on, as it already does).

“[W]e'll enter your name in a drawing for an Apple iPad as soon as you've completed the survey.”
      --Colleen O'Keefe, NovellIn other Novell news, other than security problems in its proprietary software [1, 2] there is little or nothing about SUSE. In its PR blog, Novell has promoted Fog Computing over the past week [1, 2, 3].

Whether or not Novell will sell OpenSUSE we don't know yet, but the rumour we got has not yet gotten any corroboration. Neither Novell nor Canonical denied this, so people take the rumour into serious consideration. ⬆