[NEWS] - Novell offers protection for it's Linux customers

[CougTek]

After the Novell acquisition of SUSE is done, Novell will offer some legal protection to it's SUSE customers. You will have to sign up for support etc., but that is not surprising.

More resistance against SCO again.


News source

Submitted by The_JoJo

 

[Buck]

Resist away! As Fool so kindly pointed to in another thread, Groklaw is worth reading regarding this SCO Debacle.

 

[Mercutio]

I can't decide if I'm interested in Novell's Linux strategy or not. Part of me thinks it's a case of a management grudge against Microsoft more than any interest in the technology, another part thinks we have a match made in Server heaven... except SuSE has always been a desktop-focussed distro.
So... is Novell going to focus on making a competivie desktop (they also own Ximian, after all), something they haven't exactly had any facility with in the past, or are they going to merge SuSE with their Netware products?

Novell is only indemnifying its own customers, here, but in my opinion it's something they should've done from the first moments of the $700 license fee; Novell's legal stance against SCO has always been clear, but their customers were kind of in a "what if" limbo before now. I wonder if they did it to rescue sales or if this is a genuine "good guy" maneuver.

 

[P5-133XL]

Novell is a corporation - There is no such thing as a "good guy" maneuver.


As a company they have gone from top-of-the-hill to bottom-of-the-barrel by making quite a few very bad decisions. The best single example that I can think of is what they did to Word Perfect. I think of them now as a desperate company trying to make lemonaide from the lemons they now have. It is very much reminicent of Corel and their attempt at Linux except Novell still has a lot more synergy going for it than Corel had.

 

[Mercutio]

Novell didn't *have* to indemnify SuSE customers at all, but it did. It got a lot of positive press for doing so. So to re-phrase, was this a positive PR move, or was there a serious need to reassure SuSE/Novell customers?

 

[blakerwry]

by indemnifying SuSE users, don't you think that will attract customers to novell/SuSe vs things like redhat which are more name brand in the linux server market?

Seems like a PR move to me (a smart one).