"According to Justin Steinman, director of marketing for Linux and open platform solutions at Novell, the downloads for SUSE Linux 11, which Novell apparently shortens to "Code 11" internally when it talks about it, were 10 per cent higher in May (the most recent month which it has put figures together for as we talked to Steinman) than they were for SUSE Linux 10 in the year-ago month.
"Steinman was not at liberty to provide exact download figures - none of the big commercial Linux providers do because of the difficulty of tracking downloads through mirror sites.
"The higher download figures for SUSE Linux 11 is interesting mainly because there's nothing in a Novell support contract that compels customers to choose a particular SUSE release level when they buy support. Customers can choose earlier SUSE Linux 9 or SUSE Linux 10 releases at various Service Pack levels when they buy support, and many do because they've certified their applications to run on a particular SUSE release level on specific hardware and they don't want to go through the qualification process."
