03.13.08
Novell States Its Business Case, at Ubuntu’s and Red Hat’s Expense
“I think the vast majority, and I’d quantify that at about 80 percent to 85 percent, of the open source community actually supports this deal [with Microsoft].”
–Novell’s Justin Steinman, making stuff up
Remember the times when Novell ridiculed ‘opponents’ such as Ubuntu, making all sort of small and subtle implications? As Shane pointed out back then, Justin Steinman gently suggested that Ubuntu is not suitable for the enterprise. Shane said: “Novell’s Justin Steinman went so far as to say that Ubuntu lacked “enterprise quality” support options, making it suitable for the “technical enthusiast” community.” He took similar cheap swings at Red Hat.
A long time has passed since then. But here we have a bit of a deja vu. Have a look at the following remarks.
“Frankly, we consider Ubuntu a consumer desktop,” says [Novell’s] Applebaum. “When you use Linux in the enterprise, you need to be able to dial 1-800 ’someone’ for help.” Novell’s SuSE Linux team and channel partners are best positioned to offer that business help, Applebaum insists.
And what about Red Hat? “Candidly, we don’t see Red Hat on the desktop,” says Applebaum, before quipping: “But we’re still waiting. We’ve yet to encounter them [in the desktop market].” (Red Hat’s efforts to jump-start things on the desktop have hit snags.)
Justin Steinman joins this show as well. Once again it appears as though Ubuntu’s technical support gets ignored (thus perpetuating a myth) and Fedora is treated as inexistent. Novell will find it increasingly hard to give real reasons to choose SUSE. It knows this. █
Also see: Novell’s FUD Affinity
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.
Ian said,
March 13, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Within the scope of “enterprise solutions”, fedora really doesn’t matter.
MEX said,
March 13, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Indeed. And the same goes for Ubuntu RHEL, SLED/S and maybe Gentoo on some servers but that’s pretty much it.
Victor Soliz said,
March 13, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Well, perhaps Novell people now think in the same old nazi joke about repeating the same lie over and over again. I am not sure why they are trying so hard to squish their reputation daily with such attacks on other projects. The OS community does not appreciate bad neighbors, I must say.
Roy Schestowitz said,
March 13, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I find it most ironic that Novell tore down its Web pages that criticise Windows after it had signed the deal with Microsoft. Novell even has new pages that pretty much advocate and assist Vista.
You really have to wonder if Novell sees Ubuntu as more of an ‘enemy’ than Microsoft. Novell calls Microsoft “a partner”.