Novell to acquire Suse

[Derek Doucette]

Dan Coutu said:
> On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 09:40, Michael ODonnell wrote:
>>  http://www.suse.com/us/company/press/press_releases/archive03/novell_suse.html
>
> This is pretty interesting. Now couple this with Red Hat's announcement
> yesterday that they were discontinuing the ordinary Red Hat Linux
> distribution and only selling the enterprise package. That particular
> announcement had left me thinking that maybe SuSe would be a good
> choice for the distribution to switch to.

I think that redhat may have shot themselves in the foot here a bit, but
not necessarially in there decision, but more in the way they announced
it.  There is still the possibility of much good coming from this if
fedora comes through as planned.  It is my understanding that essentially
fedora is still redhat, but will be developed at a more bleeding edge
rate, with the good advances from the project being thrown into redhat
enterprise.  It will still be more of a "techie toy" so to speak as there
won't be support you can buy for it, but there will still be errata and
tons of support via google and lists such as this.  The register had an
interesting sit down with Matthew Szulik trying to put this into
persepctive.  I credit redhat for trying to make a buck on a product by
providing support to business.  I have no problem paying for a product
that will be stable and an alternative to server OS in the business
world, and believe that fedora would serve all my needs for personal use.
 I'm sure this will start some debate, so I have my flame suit ready :) 
But I think that there is room for some opinions and thoughts here.

That aside, I'm kinda interested in seeing what Novell will do in the
future.  Combine this with the acquiring of ximian earlier this year, and
with the cult like following of some NDS users and they have potential to
make some strides.



Derek Doucette
http://derek.homeunix.org