09.27.09

Novell Customers Complain About New Charges

Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 2:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A new share of Novell and SUSE problems

NOVELL has once again failed to deliver to its customers what they consider to be acceptable terms. According to this report from The Register, Novell has added new fees which raise the cost of the product in unexpected ways that customers never anticipated.

Commercial operating system and add-on systems software maker Novell this week felt the ire of its user base, as it warned partners that in a few months it would be requiring that customers get a maintenance contract on software before they would get access to patches, updates, and technical documents for that software.

[...]

The gnashing of teeth began shortly after this hit the forums. And Colleen O’Keefe, senior vice president of teleweb and operations for Novell’s services group, jumped on the Novell forums with a post that tried to clarify, explaining that this change would not affect SUSE Linux products. These are distributed for free, given their open source nature, but they require a subscription already to get patches and updates other than the freebie security patches.

O’Keefe added that the change in maintenance requirements did not apply to NetWare, to any products that have moved beyond “the general support phase of the product lifecycle,” or to customers with ALA/SLA licenses in academia, who get all kinds of breaks from Novell.

As Novell’s problems in the UK carry on, more of the British press writes about it.

Novell takes axe to flagging VARs

[...]

After completing a distribution cull, Novell is embarking on a ‘clean-out’ of resellers who are failing to invest in the software vendor.

SUSE too has its share of issues. Here is the latest example:

Unfortunately, a new kernel was part of the updates and when the laptop rebooted it was in a bad state. X windows wouldn’t start and critically, there were no network drivers for the new kernel. To make matters worse, OpenSUSE does not keep the old kernels in /boot (why is that?) so there was nothing to fall back on.

Marcel Gagné had a similar issue some months ago. █

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Novell Retreats From New Policy as the Company Loses Sense of Faithfulness

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