“Novell is getting money, they claim, market share, although you
will note Andy Updegrove challenges that story, pointing out that
sales leveled off after the initial spike. But the main takeaway,
as they might put it, for me is that this is an anti-Red Hat deal,
and Novell is thrilled about that. Justin Steinman reveals that to
market their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server against Red Hat they ask,
‘Do you want the Linux that works with Windows? Or the one that
doesn’t?’ It’s just appalling. Let me ask you developers who are
kernel guys a question: When you contributed code to the kernel,
was it your intent that it be used against Red Hat? How about the
rest of you developers? Is that all right with you, that your code
is being marketed by Novell like that? I also have questions about
antitrust issues, with Microsoft being Novell’s partner in such
deals and sales pitches. Nothing speaks louder about Microsoft’s
true determination never to be actually interoperable than this
conference.“They all speak marketdroid language, which I don’t, so I’ll
just tell you that what I get from it is they have no idea the
damage they have done…”