“It is in Novell’s interest - selfish interest, I will admit - to advance-remove whatever those inhibitors be to the advancement of Linux and open source.”

--John Dragoon, Senior VP at Novell

The following new blog post makes it quite clear. Some people use OpenSUSE only when there is no other choice. Reason? The Novell/Microsoft deal.

I didn’t have any other 64 bit distros laying around so I opted to reinstall openSUSE 10.3 again.

[...]

I would still like to try out a different distro because of the Novell - Microsoft deal, but until things get to a point where I can sit down and really figure out how to make another distro work, I’m not going to fix what isn’t broken.

The following comprehensive article about Red Hat bothers to mention how Red Hat differentiates itself from Novell.

Staying true to Free Software ideals

One thing that Red Hat deserves respect for is staying true to their Free Software ideals. All of the software they have written (with a few exceptions like their Red Hat Network service) has been released under the GPL. They didn't come up with some alternative license like so many others have. Red Hat has also publicly said that they will make no patent deals with Microsoft like Novell and a few others have.

Tactless and selfish (by John Dragoon's admission) patent deals ought to give people a reason to avoid Xandros, Linspire, Novell and Turbolinux.

It was interesting to find a cartoon from Illiad which pokes fun at Novell's so-called 'interoperability' lab [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. ⬆