"MOSTLY normal" would be a reasonable term to use to describe SUSE's progress over the past week. Novell's spinners had some words to drop about "service pack", but their essay was actually contributed by Michele Casey, who is not among the spinners but a product manager. Michele wrote:

With the Long Term Service Pack Support program, customers receive a minimum of 12 additional months to plan, test and deploy service pack updates in your data center. This provides at least 18 months to implement a migration strategy. During this time, Novell continues to provide the critical support needed for issues that may arise during this transition period.

A hypothetical dialogue led us to discussing this new press release from Novell. It's about bringing Linux 'patent tax' to China in the form of SLE*. The summary is:

Agreement with China Standard Software Company calls for joint technical, marketing and support efforts to accelerate adoption of Linux

This attempt to fight free GNU/Linux distributions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] is an abomination that was also covered in NewsFactor (original here).

Novell has signed a cooperation agreement with China Standard Software Company (CS2C), the leading Linux firm in China.

The two companies will promote the development and adoption of Linux in the country, and combine resources on distribution of technology and services for the Chinese market.

"Together, we will drive the acceptance of Linux in the industry," said Qin Yong, CS2C executive vice president in a statement. "We are looking forward to closer cooperation with Novell in the future."

Here is a discussion about Novell's value proposition in SLE* compared to other GNU/Linux distributions which are well known and have no patent tax associated with them.

Novell owns, develops and supports SUSE Linux, which took the place of its own NetWare operating system. Novell offers SUSE Linux in two basic flavors: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Novell has a long history of first-rate support and some of the best technical folks in the business.

Novell opts for a somewhat conservative stance concerning its flagship operating system in favor of stability over leading-edge features. Competitive support pricing for both Standard and Priority options and Novell's rock-solid stability make it a palatable business choice.

In other SUSE news, DreamWorks turns out to be a SUSE user. Only a few days ago we wrote about Microsoft's co-founder selling his shares of DreamWorks.

In a sign of the economic times, DreamWorks Animation has inked a deal with the New Mexico Computing Applications Center to use spare capacity to help render its 3D films.

[...]

The whole shebang runs Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and SGI's ProPack 5 extensions for HPC workloads. On the Linpack Fortran benchmark test, it has a sustained performance of 133.2 teraflops. According to Governor Bill Richardson's office - which made the announcement of the DreamWorks deal - this makes Encanto the largest non-federal supercomputer in the world.

Novell was among those participating in a lobby for open source in the United States government. There is a troll article in The Register, but "skippy" writes a better one.

The letter contained all the classic elements of an open source group hug: freedom, interoperability, community, and transparency. This letter was signed by higher-ups at companies we know and love, like Red Hat, Novell, Unisys, and a handful of other smaller players who want to suckle from the teat of a federal contract.

From CrunchGear:

Signed by representatives from Novell, Red Hat, Unisys, and a bunch of other open source solutions companies, the letter is well-written piece of advocacy. Of course, not everyone supports the initiative.

So that's about it. Not much, but at least more than nothing. ⬆