Re: Novell, Suse and the future of Linux

On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, Damien Hull wrote:

> I just read a rant about Novell and Suse on /dot. It seems Linux
> products are still considered "risky". Most of what I read had something
> bad to say about Novell and their products. That would include Netware
> etc...
>
> There seem to be three problems.
> 1. Not enough advertising. ( I agree )
> 2. No support for the enterprise in Suse.
> 3. Free Linux distributions offer the same thing.

<snip>

> Where does this leave the commercial Linux distributions? Will Novell
> and Red Hat make it or will they loose out to FREE software?
>
> As long as CentOS is stable, updated and free I'll be using it.

I strongly dislike Red Hat, but people have been forecasting their death for
years. Hasn't happened, and the company is doing well financially. I dislike
SuSE only slightly less, but there is commercial support for SuSE Enterprise
depending on how you get it. IBM, for instance, provides support for SuSE for
general troubleshooting and software integration (and for any of their
products running on SuSE). Part of your software maintenance agreement
includes software updates and OS support from SuSE/Novell.

In short, regardless of whether or not Novell can turn the ship around I think
commercial distributions will be around a *long* time, particularly when so
many vendors will only provide support for their software on those
distributions.

Personally, I use my own distribution for both x86 & POWER5, I've yet to see
any compelling reason to subject myself to those distributions, so I agree
there's no practical obstacles or implications for not going the free route.
Even so, I don't see commercial distributions going away.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/
           Digital Mages -- http://www.digitalmages.com/
           "Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
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Received on Wed Mar 8 13:20:24 2006