[Discuss] MS and Novell

[pw]

Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert wrote:
- How about Novell outs the screws to Miicrosoft, drops the 
multi-million dollars owed

-to Novell in favour of making Windows operate iin a more friendly 
manner with Linux.

- Novell also made sure their free SuSe offering is equivalent

-to the one available for subscription, unlike RedHat and was one of

-the main reasons we moved to SuSe.  We use a lot of Oracle products,

-which developers can use and obtain for free, but then have to spend 
$4K to run

-them on RedHat (If they want to match their client environment).  Using 
SuSe our contracted

-developers can use the same target OS, get support if required (or we 
can raise the issue

-under our support agreements) and still aren't required to buy 
licenses.  It made me very

-unhappy to have been a supporter on RedHat's and bring in the first 
Oracle on RedHat installs

-here in Victoria, to have them close off their free offering and 
thereby limit the consulting

-community we were positioing to leverage.  Switching to SuSe maintained 
that original goal of

-a $0 software license load on the developer and keeping the more 
cautious client environment

-in a licensed, supported and local gov't standard Oracle db.


- I'm happy that Novell was able and willing to convert lots of owed 
dollars into something

-that could potentially lower the barriers to using Linux in a Microsoft 
environment.  I can tell

-you that annoucement alone has lowered worries for clients here in the 
US (as of yesterday) of

-putting SuSe in the Windows data centre.

- Cheers,
- Thor HW


Interesting. So you see a net benefit to the enterprise
linux community fro this. Mostly due to Microsoft picking
a platform/distro to officially support with MS drivers
etc.

The use of Oracle on linux is also interesting. Why does
Oracle not work on other distros? Or is it manly a support issue?

Peter