Bonum Certa Men Certa

Red Hat: Open Source Just a Hobby to Novell

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

--Linus Benedict Torvalds, 1991



Anonymous reader informs us: 'Here's something you may find interesting. Yesterday, we had some Red Hat sales representatives take us out to lunch. On their own, they asked us whether we use Novell/Suse. My reaction of course was "why would we do that?" and I later made a comment about how they so casually signed the deal with Microsoft, which makes them suspect. After receiving comments like that, they still took the trouble to say that Novell still primarily makes money by selling proprietary software and that they only "do open source as a hobby." Clearly, Red Hat is worried about Novell. (Come to think of it, why not? After all, we all know what happened to Novell's original Linux spinoff which started out as Caldera.)'



Steve BallmerHere is what the reader is referring to: Novell Rejected GNU/Linux a Decade Ago

Can Novell be the next SCO or at least spawn another SCO?

As we wrote very recently: SCO Also Used to Contribute to Linux, Just Like Novell

Remember what Microsoft's CEO said: “We believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability […] I do think it [Novell deal] clearly establishes that open source is not free.” Sounds familiar?

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