12.04.07
Quick Mention: Red Hat Thinks Novell’s SLERT is a Beta, Ripoff (Updated)
What goes around comes around
As we’ve shown in the past, Justin Steinman and Ron Hovsepian have both offered their share of Red Hat FUD. However, to be fair, this type of treatment appears to be going in both ways. Here is what Red Hat had to say about SUSE’s real-rime variant: (version 10 released last week)
Red Hat has an announcement tomorrow that we’ll be telling you about in due course. In the meantime, here’s a snippet: a Red Hat vice president slated Novell’s real-time SUSE Linux which launched last week, saying it’s code that Red Hat would only treat as beta - and Red Hat should know because it wrote most of it.
Such competitiveness could be seen before, but rarely has the FUD appeared to be coming from Red Hat’s direction. Red Hat has quite a strong policy on FUD, based on their recruiters’ confession. █
Related old article:
Red Hat’s Answer to Novell Market Start
“Novell’s model is a different channel-friendly model, whereas Red Hat is putting them on an online exchange,” Novell’s Steinman argued. “It’s kind of an interesting question for the marketplace to see which model will succeed.”
[…]
“They’re doing something we’ve already done and they’re doing it slightly differently,” Justin Steinman, Novell’s director of product marketing for Linux, told internetnews.com about RHX. “I’d actually submit they are doing it in a channel unfriendly way.”
Update (05/12/2007): Novell has responded to Red Hat’s accusations.
On a related note, some sites have picked up on Red Hat’s comments and written headlines like “Novell accused of reselling Red Hat code.” Again, this is open source. It isn’t Red Hat code any more than the millions of lines of code contributed by Novell and others to dozens of open source projects belong to any one organization or individual. That’s the open source model … just like Red Hat used to talk about.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.