Thanks Matt, that was a terrific update on
where these company's are headed.
I have never commented or responded to
any message on chat boards but felt compelled
to respond to your article. I have been following
novell since the mid 80's. I was heavily invested
in novl at the 2000 crash and have not recovered
since. I will be 65 in March and hoping 2006
cures some of my mistakes of the past with novl.
Please keep posting. I will be looking for your
updates in the future.
Have a blessed day!
Enjoy your life.
Tom Burke

[Asay comment: The below comment is valid so far as it goes, but misses the point of "ecosystem." That ecosystem is not the Linux kernel (where RHAT is dominant). It's the growing commercial open source vendor ecosystem - Alfresco, SugarCRM, PeerSec, SpikeSource, BitRock, Centeris, etc. etc. etc. Each of these companies, without exception that I'm aware of, defaults to SUSE given the chance.]

"(Red Hat) has to play catch-up in being a central part of the growing open source ecosystem."

Ha ha ha ha ha ha

*gasp, gasp*

Pardon me, but that shows such a total lack of understanding of the open source community that I have to catch my breath.

Plenty of people have reviled Red Hat for various actions in the past. But it is ignorant to claim that Red Hat is not central to the open source ecosystem. In fact, it is this central role that explains why Red Hat is so often reviled. You can't get anywhere without their help, but you can't get their attention with out money -- that's the perception in the FLOSS community.

Take a look at the commits to the Linux kernel for the last five years. Red Hat is by far a top-three contributor, as both a direct author and clearing house for patches from the community.

It is arguable that GNOME owes it's current foothold on Linux to Red Hat's support.

There are literally hundreds of successful FLOSS projects that gained extreme value from Red Hat being in the middle of the money and the community.

Red Hat's values are right in the center of one of its popular inventions, the RPM package. That package is *always* pristine source plus patches, and the number of patches to complex areas such as the kernel has reduced drastically over the years. Red Hat works tirelessly with customers, partners, and community members to get changes put in upstream rather than carrying another patch to the kernel. Sure, this reduces Red Hat's support costs, but it is a great benefit to everyone, and it comes from the idea of being a good member of the FLOSS ecosystem.

My friend, you make some interesting cases and show some good insight into both companies. However, it sounds as if your understanding of FLOSS ecosystem dynamics stops at the corporate edge.

If you disagree, I suggest you or someone with skills take a look at the last five years of commits to the Linux kernel. Hint: script-fu is your little helper here.

Red Hat provides proven open source technologies. Novell provides a mix of closed and open source technologies.

Red Hat leads in providing supportable enterprise class open source solutions.

Novell is still trying to find it's niche in the open source would as seen by it's inclusion of every conflicting third party patch and open source project on the net.

As time passes Novell is simply deciding to model the Red Hat way of doing things as seen with it's move to make GNOME the default desktop, it's release of "openSuSe", and it's subscription model.

weather you prefer redhat or some other distro, you can't argue that without redhat linux would not be where it is today. A quick look at this page demonstrates just a few of red hat's major contributions to the community:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

Novell came to the game late and from my perception doesn't seem to "get" the open source community the way red hat does. Not sure where all the community animosity toward red hat comes from, but i know i'm thankful (as a gentoo user) that they are as successful.

Sigh.... SUSE has made an equal (if not more) number of contributions. I personally find SUSE to be more stable and easier to maintain in the datacenter than Red Hat (I have to do both). My preference is SUSE... I can just get things done faster with it than with Red Hat. Our developers say our SLES9 boxes outbench our AS3 and AS4 boxes under network tests.

I think Novell doesn't believe in what they have. SUSE is much more enterprise friendly. Red Hat tends to play better against itself. SUSE integrates better with a mixed OS environment.

Novell is falling way behind in the Enterprise Server side and focusing all of their attention on the desktop. I use Suse10 and am Ok with it. I am not crazy about how they have made their own version of OpenOffice. In the default file format that it saves in is not compatible with OpenOffice 1.1.5 or even OpenOffice 2beta. This is just one example of many of just how much energy and talent they have thrown at the desk top. I am not displeased with SUSE10 I think it is great for a desktop OS I question it use however on a high end workstation it is not as fast as RedHat. RedHatEL4 W\S is not as fast as Slackware 10.2

SUSE Enterprise Linux 9 is a great operating system for an Enterprise Server even 64 bit. However it is feeling its age. SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 will be available for another 4 to 6 months maybe even later. By the time SLES10 is out it will be as outdated as SLES9 is now. What good is that Novell.

RedHat on the other hand seems more clearly focused on the Enterprise market and has products and updates more in focus with the current set of demands.

So the one point made in this article that Novell cant get over its fight with Microsoft is still very much evident to me. If I was running Novell I would rip off the rear view mirror and start focusing on the future and profit instead of settling and old grudge.

If Novell keeps it up they could just be remaking another Word Perfect, Netware or DrDOS as they have done so many times before. You would think they would learn that everyone can see the chip on their sholder and it does not make it attractive to buy into a revenge driven business.

Product.....????

I've use Redhat for about 6 years (used slackware before) but now I like SUSE alot.

Novell is a traditionally a closed source company and started with Linux & Open Source just to compliment their closed source offerings. Now learning to be an Open Source company at Large, Open SUSE is a good sign.

Customers:

Innovations that Red Hat has put into the Open Source, whole of the Linux market will be Red Hat customer forever.

Off-course Novell started late and most of SUN has not started yet ? and obviously that will take time to catch up in the corporate strategy.

I guess yeah, size does not matters really so maybe 980 of Red Hats does not do a worthy job ? so perhaps 100% RHL customers reverting to signup for RHEL SLAs for what ?

Hey, you know what yes Red Hat had been targeting UNIX to Linux migration you know why ? cause that was a strategy, let me tell you Red Hat will not sell desktops to end user yet. You know why because thats the part of strategy too.

I want tell you some thing about the Windows part as well, Red Hat is slowly competing there as well. What you call Novell experience in computing and software really does not takes two hands up than Red Hat, for all the proved experience in supporting the Open Source platforms is what really matters to the customer here.

After all there is a difference between Novell and Red Hat like in Microsoft and Google, you mentioned it as well. Novell is an old established corporate so you always have plenty of free hands to put for trails in new business and to fire people but Red Hat does not even moves its eye brow if it has not to catch a view of a big coin rolling down its pocket.

Oh ! about the market, I recall Bob Young once said explained about market size and open source, the whole world and potential of software computing can never be of one single vendor's, so it obviously has place for other players.

Culture:

You know what sometimes right click does not really work on a Novell SUSE Desktop, thats not because there is a bug with KDE or GNOME because your mouse has gone faulty. I am sure you have no experience of Red Hat culture or you could use a barrel of ink to write for this part.

Red Hat CEO runs his ship real tightly, as they are not Novell with enough free hands, but Red Hat are always there with winnings of any prospective deployments and they always have support of hundreds of most effective consultants around the world when ever Red Hat has a job.

Partners:

What is the center of this Open Source echo system ? do you guys own the OSI or is it FSF ? If Red Hat was really difficult to work with would you still have them around to compete with ?

Red Hat has a solid history of keeping with partner commitments and had always preferred competent partners only.

Conclusion:

Conclusion is little same as what I recalled of bob Young a little above, and that there are 100 odd other Linux vendors you did not compare Novell with yet. More than that I have an inside tip for you, its the quality of coffee that makes a difference of culture at Red Hat ;)

A person above said Novell is putting all their resources into Desktop, this is incorret, have you tried their server products? They are good, they can use some work, but IMO they are good and gaining at a very fast pace.

Novell has put a lot into the desktop, because that is how they will get peoples attention, and to also integrate it into their already stable, and IMO best directory service known as eDirectory (I think it is FAR supirior to AD an the same with ZenWorks to SMS).

But again this isn't a Novell / M$ issue.

Redhat and Fedora Core were both previous favorites of mine, until all the noise of SuSE 10 started to surfface, and I admit, I jumped on the wagon to test it out, and I am hooked, I think it is an outstanding product, and can't see my self going to anything else (Since my swich I tried going back and using FC5 along with Ubuntu and Kubuntu) and still, like SuSE better.

I hope Novell does drop their battle with M$ and joins more with the open source community.

"Sigh.... SUSE has made an equal (if not more) number of contributions"

Even a MS presentation on Linux showed Red Hat to be the largest commercial contributor to Linux in terms of percentage of code contributors to the kernel. It is beyond disputable. Go check the git commits

"(Since my swich I tried going back and using FC5 along with Ubuntu and Kubuntu) and still, like SuSE better."

Hold it right there. You tried using FC5 already even before its released. Good Job. Wish I could do that

I was forced into a Novell world when I took my current job (6 or 7 years ago). I had come from an M$ background (to make money) and I played with *nix for fun. When I started I did not know anything about Novell's products.

I quickly found the following two statements to be true:
1. Novell directory services (NDS, eDir, whatever they call it next) is the best heterogenous directory known to man.
2. Novell has some of the best software engineers and some of the worst marketing people.

I got really involved with Novell's first consolidated *nix suite NTerprise Linux Services (Hamachi) as a beta tester. I was originally using RHEL ES 2.1 as my host platform until they purchased SUSE and kindly recommended that we move to SLES 8. Then I was "grandfathered in" to the Open Enterprise Server beta. I truly believe that this is the best Enterprise linux offering on the market. Sun and Red Hat are just trying to catch up now (although I still use RHEL at home).

I still worry about Novell and I am surprised the author did not mention this point.

Novell has a problem with losing its' best upper management. The three most significant ones are Alan Nugent, Chris Stone, and Eric Schmidt in my opinion. Plus, the SUSE German guy left pretty mad (at least they still have Nat, Robert Love, and Miguel... I think). There seems to be a large group of people who do not like Jack Messman. This bothers me as a customer and as a shareholder (I also own MSFT and RHAT for full disclosure).

They definitely have a very unsuccessful desktop fascination right now. I am sure the market value of desktop OSes makes the server side look like a joke. I do use NLD and SUSE 10 as my primary desktop OSes. SUSE + YAST + KDE = happiness in my pants. The GNOME announcement scared me (I am sure it is because they had more Ximian people left than SUSE).

Long story short (not if you read my entire babble) the current direction Novell appears to be heading is concerning to me. The author did put some of this to rest by referencing the current top dog "Ron" as the guy in charge (my investment people say Jack is on his way out). Red Hat still seems to be a great innovative company who is trying to make money off of free software (which I 100% support), but they are having trouble finding ways to make additional profits off something that is in essence free.

George Van Tuyl - You are funny. You think Novells enterprise offerings sucks because You dont't like the default file format that OO2 saves the documents in? And the claim that SLES9 is outdated? Compared to what? Which kernel version is RedHat shipping?

You forgot one important point in your comparing: Red Hat always release all the software they write or buy as Free (as in speach) software. Novell have also contributed mutch, but Red Hat is still number 1 here. (100% is kind of hard to beat)

Ubuntu is free, and much nicer IMHO. Why pay for Linux? You can purchase support from Canonical directly if you ever need to on a per case basis or by subscription. They provide great support, and don't care how much money you are making for them. Fsck the subscription-based update services, Linux is something that should never be paid for unless you have highly specialized scenarios or environments. Typical desktops don't fall into this category...
--
Kristian Hermansen

Sveinung: Could you please point me at the source for the RHN satellite server and the provisioning tools that come with it? Because I've been trying and I sure can't find it. Maybe you know where it's stashed.

RHAT does not release the source to all of their tools. They love to hear people say that they do, but they just don't do it.

But people forget that RedHat is losing a lot of their GCC developers to different companies like Apple or Codesourcery. Though most of these developers worked in the old embeded part of RedHat (which was orginally part of cygnus).

The other major difference between Novell and RedHat is the "other" language they are supporting more. RedHat is going big in the free Java while Novell is big in the free C#. Though it looks like Novell is starting to learn that the free Java is important and starting to add it to SuSE.

But going back to my orginally point is that RedHat is going away from its business that it bought from Cygnus and focusing more and more on GNU/Linux instead of free software in general and other companies like Codesourcery are picking up the slack there and making RedHat less important in the free software world.

Novell (well really SuSE labs) is hiring more and more people for developing free software such as GCC and glibc and the kernel.

IBM was the major force behind Novell buying SuSE (yes that is true). They wantted their old partner (Novell) to help them out in the GNU/Linux world. AMD and IBM are major partners with SuSE and now Novell (well as said before was already major partnerns with Novell).

RedHat gets less and less business from processor companies which was one of their source of revenue and Redhat is losing more and more people to other companies faster than Novell is hiring people.

Redhat is becoming more and more impersonal kinda like how Microsoft is. Novell is becoming more and more like the old days at Redhat/Cygnus which are good days that some people could considered the best days.

Note I have no connection to Redhat or Novell except for working with some of their employees on GCC.

Suse, Redhat, Atari, Amiga, Vi, Emacs. It's all the same arguements (I got personally banned from 5 BBS's for starting the Atari/Amiga debates in the late 80's). Who Cares?

The simple fact is, Rehat started strong in the US, but their usability has really faltered in recent years (I've worked with it since 5.2). They have all but written off the desktop. Novell saw a good deal when they noticed Suse heading for the desktop market. And with Novell's established customer support channel, can go places with it.

But has anyone really noticed Mandriva lately? They are forging ahead on all fronts. Their product works really well for servers and desktops alike (I have 5 systems at home running Mandriva, 1 laptop, 2 desktops, a server, and a firewall). Their installation and desktop usability have really been hammered on, to the point where my mother was able to install it on my older Thinkpad effortlessly. Sound and XWindows worked right the first time. She even was able to do some legal documents in OpenOffice with no help from me (she just retired last month as a paralegal). Her only complaint? She only saw 1/3 of the normal daily email come through to her email reader (kmail). She had to ask me twice what happened to all the spam she normally has to weed through on her Windows system.

Redhat is doing a good thing by making the core OS stable. Suse is working on the desktop. Mandriva is making Linux good for everyone, desktop and server alike. Notice that they are currently the only Linux distribution that is certified for Intel Centrino wireless laptop systems.

As far as Red Hat is concerned, I refuse to support them as a leader anymore. I actually was duped into buying their boxed versions way back when they had a general consumer version. They lost me as a customer when they moved to their current pricing and distribution platform. I have little respect for the money grubbing they've done. On the other hand, I will give them credit for their contributions to FOSS, in particular the Linux kernel. I will also say that they, for a long time, were synonimous with Linux. That put Linux in the minds of individuals and companies through out the US.

Novell is a different story. They, for a long portion of their business history, have been a closed source server OS manufacturer. Their recent hop onto the Linux bandwagon shouldn't be surprising. Their server software is robust, and has been for a long time. I believe they are on the right track, but they still have some things to learn about FOSS and the community as a whole. They will learn and also become more of a presence in the community.

Personally, I like Kubuntu for desktop, but that's just me. For server side, I like CentOS 4 (RHEL 4 work alike built off the RHEL sources). I like it because it's free as in beer. If I ever do get my business going and making money, I'll probably go back to RH, but only if they can guarantee support for the platform (got burned by RHL 9. Until then, it's the free alternative for me.

It is great that Novell and Red Hat have already risen to such great heights by developing Open Source software.

It seems like there is alot of emphasis on large and medium business, but there is a huge untapped market with small business clients. Microsoft is taking advantage of this segment with its Small Business Server package.

As the open source movement matures, a Linux business should have the advantage over Microsoft because of the large number of open source (and thus inexpensive) offerings.

Looking at Red Hat and Novell's home pages, only Novell has a link to its Small Business offerings. Does this mean Novell is friendlier to the small business?

learn to spell before posting comments, damnit!!
"alot" instead of "a lot", "it's" instead of "it is"; "off-course" instead of "of course".

good _grief_ guys!

anyway.

matt: thank you for your insights.

the advantage of both novell and redhat is that
there is a means to focus _some_ energies onto
issues that paying customers believe matter.

that leaves a whole stack of projects that
really really matter, strategically, that are
left chronically underfunded - and a proper
exchange replacement, which requires about a
years' worth of funding of full-time reverse-engineering effort before it can really
get off the ground, is one such critical project.

once there is a "first release", suddenly there
would be a flurry of effort to jump on the
bandwagon. but without that initial critical
research, it simply isn't going to happen.

clock's ticking whilst microsoft is still making
money, guys...

From my European standpoint the story is a little different because RedHat was dominating the US market only. RedHat was quite popular though with those UNIX-guys in data-centers which may correlate to Wall-Street. Here we are talking about big iron where the software-licence doesn't really matter and all that counts is 24/7.

The vast majority of the LINUX-market though are SMEs which want to replace their old NT, AS400 or even Novell boxes. This is the playground of Novell/SuSE because they easyly integrate into these existing networks. Biggest contender here ist Debian which is often adopted where certificates and extra-support don't count (and their package-system is far superior to RPM).

On the client-side SuSE has always been top of its class. Just take a look which distributions work best with different notebooks! In this market SuSE will have to battle Ubuntu in the future.

Exactly, everything RedHat does is open source, and NOT everything that Novell does (even strictly regarding SuSE) is open source. Period.

First:

"Red Hat has a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners approach to the market. If you're not making them money, you're not going to get their ear. At times, because of how tightly Szulik runs the ship, they simply didn't have enough employees to be able to service all the demand, causing people outside the company to view Red Hat as aloof and arrogant."

I approached Ximian before they sold to Novell to describe their technology offerings to a group of interested scientists and engineers. I can't say how Novell performs relative to Ximian, but Ximian's chief architect blew us off and failed to show up for a pre-arranged demonstration of their premier technology. The alternative we were offered when their architect bailed on us was for ME to do THEIR dog-and-pony for them. The presentation they offered could only be shown using a Microsoft Windows machine.

I can't think of a more arrogant or aloof way to treat potential customers than they way Ximian (which is now Novell) treated us.

Since that time not one salesperson from Novell has attempted to contact us regarding their Linux offerings. We have 4,200 employees and run a heterogeneous computing environment that includes a Linux cluser (and an IBM supercomputer). You would think that we would be a natural customer (e.g., low-hanging fruit). To date, not one peep from Novell - but Red Hat is solidly working to entrench itself in our Unix replacement strategy.

"I quickly found the following two statements to be true:
1. Novell directory services (NDS, eDir, whatever they call it next) is the best heterogenous directory known to man.
2. Novell has some of the best software engineers and some of the worst marketing people."

That latter statement couldn't be any more true. I think that the Novell has some great offerings, they have been an infrastructure player where I have worked for two decades, and they have the potential to out-perform most of the other Linux players. The problem is that they ignore their customers, both current and potential.

They do so at their peril.

This article is baloney and feels like it was written by a Novell groupie who has never administered a large installation of Linux systems.

Our experience with SUSE Enterprise has been pretty poor. The directory layout is kludgy and seems to change from version to version. The RedHat directories match what we were already familiar with (Slackware) and more often than not match the documentation already out on the web.
So for us, RedHat Enterprise has been quite a bit easier to manage and we've found it to be supported by more application server vendors.

I just don't trust Novell to support Linux the same way that RedHat has. They don't have a great
history of sticking with and promoting a product that many times is technically superior to what their competition has created (i.e. Netware 3 versus NT). RedHat has supported Linux for a very long time and did not run away from that support when business was poor. I can't say that Novell is going to do the same thing.

[Asay comments: Wow! Damned if I do, damned if I don't. I'm usually criticized for being overly favorable toward Red Hat. At least, that's what they used to tell me when I worked at Novell.

As for Novell not sticking with losing products, are you serious? The company has stuck with NetWare for two decades. Were you hoping for three? And it faithfully sticks with its other products that i think it should have shelved long ago. I'd be interested in seeing a single example of what you describe. (That said, I think it's important to note that RHAT, not NOVL, **did** run away from the unprofitable part of its Linux business. It's called Fedora.]

SuSE Rulez

Redhat is missing SaX2 and YaST. That's all I have to say...

JAS39,

RHEL4 ships with kernel 2.6.9.x... SLES9 is using 2.6.5.x if I remember correctly. RHEL4 has SELINUX which Novell has already stated that they have no intention of supporting, ever. Also Xen is scheduled to be added in an upcoming RHEL4 update.

*warning! Long post. If you care about Novell, read, otherwise skip*

Matt, I'm with Joe Haynes on this one.

There's a statement he makes that isn't addressed in your comment - namely, that Novell fails to promote their products. This is definitely true.

But they also don't stick by their products. They may continue to develop them and will accept money for them if you wish, which they did for NetWare for a long time, but this is not the same thing.

I've never worked at Novell, but have worked with a large number of their products. Their products were strong offerings with powerful underlying technologies, poorly packaged with unusable front ends.

How many interface jockies does Novell have? Where is their UI lab? Who do they hire to canvas users to find out the fastest or most comfortable way to do something?

Do they even understand the concepts of elegance and simplicity? Who designed the interface for, say, GroupWise? Someone who hates users and doesn't want my business, that's who.

I've been in a number of positions with substantial IT buying power inside the world's largest companies. Three times they've come to talk to me.

First was to sell NDS. There was a substantial performance and feature advantage to the then nascent ActiveDirectory and our other options were a full RDBMS or a small time LDAP player.

A companies directory is no joke. When you're talking about keeping track of 174,000 people, you need some serious backing.

Oracle could have done it but the price was unbelievable - an order of magnitude more expensive.

Small time anything is too small.

So just Novell and MicroSoft.

All I can say about Novell's sales team is that they didn't want my business. They just weren't interested or engaged. There was no depth, no knowledge, no idea how their product was going to help my business - I knew better how to use their product to improve my bottom line than they did.

MicroSoft grokked the value proposition immediately. They understood how directories make money. They even had frickin' ads on TV that could have been lifted straight out of one of my conversations with the VP of IT.

Novell wanted to talk about what they saw as their key differentiators - speed, cost of product, standards compliance.

MicroSoft talked about ease of management, their online knowledge base, availability of certification and training - the only part of their pitch that rankled was that they tried to calculate my TCO for me, which I'll do myself, thanks.

Second, I was consulting for a tech company on Long Island. They wanted a solution that wasn't MicroSoft Exchange. They bought Groupwise. They would have been better off with POP3 and secretaries to schedule and keep track of meetings. The best thing about GroupWise was that it paid for Howard Taylor, who writes Schlock Mercenary, the world's best online comic.

When we tried to streamline their operation following an accounting irregularity, we discovered that one of the biggest problems was GroupWise. Everyone complained about it. It was slow, it was counter-intuitive, it was clunky. I'm inclined to agree. Ximian could help this, but must completely replace the GroupWise front end. Novell should take a lesson from Apple: Apple stopped selling it's best selling item (the iPod Mini) with a new offering in which it firmly believed (the iPod Nano). Novell should do the same. First create a product which people believe in and like, then don't sell any alternatives. It confuses your customers to do otherwise.

Third, I was leading a team of folks in a European-based financial who were looking at an Enterprise Identity Management solution. They have over 100,000 employees. Because of the number of failed EIM deployment attempts, we approached the maket with some caution.

RFIs went out to thirty vendors. Only twenty five responded; four had been purchased or were in negotiation with other folks taking part in the RFI and declined to bid.

Novell didn't even respond. Nothing. Total silence. *chirp, chirp* We weren't asking them to sell us an entire solution, we would have been happy with an optimized directory solution (one of the RFI topics). Absolutely nothing. Calls to the local Account Director went unreturned, then we found out he had moved on and no replacement was forthcoming.

Unbelievable. In my opinion, Novell should be (and will be) out of business and its assets sold off to other companies who understand what it means to be in business. They have no vision.

interesting post. However while I agree that Novell are not the best at responding to customers needs, as a person who likes to deploy and integrate the best solutions across platforms Microsoft does not come into the equation. Regardless of response to tender I make it my job to make sure the right solution is deployed.

This is a passion I have for the techinical job I do, I regret and acknowledge that Novell rely too much on engineers with such a passion. I have however also found over my years as a techie that using Novell products lends to producing passion within engineers who otherwise would just plod along. To really get to grips with a product such as e-directory because it is the best and it floats your boat is truly satisfying. This is something I feel you could never level at peoples feelings for MS products.

Novell aquiring Suse has made my last couple of years of work a joy. Coupled with the fantastic offerings from the BSD boys (namely OpenBSD and FreeBSD).

To be able to lead and designyour solutions on the platform you wish is what I believe it should be about. Enabling you to provide the best solution where suited. I am so glad that Novell have bought into this ethos (to be fair thy had to) and we are seeing the company reaping the benefits as the great products Novell have always had are deployed on the open source platform..
Choice choice choice.
Great!

We use both vendors at my company. RedHat
is all charm up to and during the sale, after
that, they're gone, never to be seen again, and
it's you vs the RedHat Network - good luck!

Novell on the otherhand, actually attends
our internal staff meeting to make sure every
thing is okay!!

If we had to settle on one vendor, it'd be
Novell - hands down.

HI!
some of you guys said that suse is better, in what ways is it better?
some of you guys said that red hat is better, in what ways is red hat better?

The big issue I have with Suse is the third party addons that our Novell reps try to sell us.

We point out that there is an equal or better open source solution we are using or intend to use instead and our reps do not return for months.

I think Novell has a real long way to go, opensuse is just a beginning, now they need to change their business model.

Suse or Debian :) My choice for now.

I found SuSe few years ago, when tried to switch from long-used FreeBSDs. All attempts to use RedHat caused a headache like "so old, so primitive, so bad packaging system, where is port system, where is administrative interface, where is partitioning...". Then we find SuSe (it was SuSe 8.2), and it was really professional system (it was not Novell these days).

Since this, 2 things happen. Novell got SuSe, and released few products such as SLES9 and SLES10 (I am talking about servers only). They are a very good products, and we are going to deploy real business on them (after using in the lab for a long).

But problem is that Novell looks as _good engineers, very bad sales, very bad strategy_.

First of all, KDE vs Gnome. KDE was a face of SuSe. It is really first PROFESSIONAL desktop I ever saw on Linuxes. After KDE, you cannot even see Gnome with it's counterintuitive menus, absense of important features, absense of unified applciations (compare Konqueror, which is system browser for everything, wioth urgly set of Nautilus for files, Firefox for Internet, etc etc ... - components are good but they all are _different_ - it means that system don't look integrated). SuSe used KDE as their attractive feature, with Gnome still available for those who need it.

Then, what we see now? Novell chooses Gnome as a primary interface? The only explanation which I have is _Ximian_, which never showed itself as an excellent product. Then we see how they began to replace pieces of YaST (second attraction for SuSe) by their other products (which violates internal SUSe rules, and are not well integrated as YaST). Sorry, but if Novell kills this distinctive features of SuSe, instead of learning how to use them in their business (instead of replacing by weaker but familiar ones), what can we have at the end? One more _Unixware_? (everyone remember the fate of this System-V Unix?)

Another problem is _feedback_. Try to download Solaris10. On the first page, you will see:
- please, send us your feedback, here is e-mail. We don't promise to answer, but we need your opinion and need your information.

Now, download SUSe beta (SLES10 beta is a good example) or some evaluation version. Read in the very, very end _for feedback use your channels_. I tried to post few mesages about bugs (in Beta's and in ISO files themself) - and each time it was a nightmare to find anyone interested (I got an answer from Beta coordinator, who said something like _we don't need your feedbacks and tests, we have enough certified beta testers to find all bugs_ ). I do not need to explain here, what it means for overall product quality.

And it scares me. if Novell began to replace high technical culture of SuSe, excellent design of SuSe architechs, perfect selection of tools and faces, by political-driven decisions (such as decision to use Gnome by default) - it can mean an end of SuSe as a distinctive product. Yes, SLES is very stable, SLES have excellent administration system, SLES keeps excellent Oracle compatibility and excellent set of embedded drivers - but RHEL4 improves each month, and it already have many uniq things which never was available for SuSe users (such as Global File System from Redhat).

So, future is not clean. if Novell will find a way to improve (we can see many signs of such improvement, including their decision to make first release of SLES10 pre-release, to allow better testing and moire feedbacks)- SuSe became a great thing. If not - we still have Fedora, RedHat and Ubuntu (and FreeBSD) to retreat to.

People are a key to success. How many SuSe developers and key architech left company, because they could not survisve Novell's culture? Do they have enough reolacements? Are they going to use face-less outsourcing to India or other countries with _many cheap engineers, bad quality but fast coding_? Are they going to replace their terrible PR people and understand a value in feedbacks? Some signs shows progress there (including OpenSuSe project), so let's see.