The Differences Between Red Hat and Novell

Tiberius_Fel writes "A former Novell employee has done a comparison at InfoWorld, reflecting on the business practices of Red Hat and Novell. They focus on such areas as customers, culture, and partners." From the article: "Red Hat has a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners approach to the market. If you're not making them money, you're not going to get their ear ... This has led the growing open source ecosystem to Novell, which is partner-centric and easy-going almost to a fault. Ron Hovsepian is changing this, and Novell is starting to become much more choosy about opportunities (customer and partnering) that come its way."

Comments

What needs to be done

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what needs to be done if Linux is ever going to take over as the "Main Stream" OS. Novell needs to leave the server stuff alone, RedHat has got linux on the server down to a science. What Novell needs to do, is take what it has in SUSE, and work on getting more linux on desktop users machines. If both companys would realise this, and work on it, it would pose a VERY big threat to Microsoft, and push Linux as the mainstream os.

~Alan

Re:The second comment in the blog has it right

[Anonymous Coward]

First SuSE labs (Novell) employees some Linux kernel developers.
Even IBM does.

Second all three employees GCC developers though they are not all equal.
RedHat has more global write maintainers than any other company but that is because they started working on GCC before any of them. RedHat's GCC developers are leaving Redhat and are going either to Apple (at least three examples) or Codesourcery (a couple) or AMD (one example though he was at metrowerks for a while). These are main developers of GCC and not just some unkown developers. Novell is gaining more and more mainainership of GCC in general, and already employees the maintainer of the x86_64 port which is one of the major ports for the comming year or two for servers (even though I don't really want to say it is as I am more of a powerpc person).

Any other point is Novell is getting more and more into free software they have to go slowly and choose and pick their partners otherwise they will find themselves in a way of the internet bobble.

-- a semi unknown GCC developer.

Enterprise environments

[recharged95]

Nice article, but it doesn't say much about the importance of the two companies co-existing and creating a market for OSS. In the end, it comes down to who has the better product--so far Red Hat has the market since it was the first on the scene as a legit business. It is attacking the right industries (Financials and Gov't-i.e. DoD), and has a strong university presence. SuSE had a lot of respect before Novell and the acquisition was looked upon as promising with all the international support, but they were slow in getting 10.0 out the door. SuSE has hardly any university presense and Novell hasn't focused on any industries aside from what IBM or Sun had before the acquisition. Though you can't beat Novell's networking knowledge base. That's the diff.

As a developer & user, Red Hat needs to tighten up on their edge releases (FC4 and it's migration to EL for instance). FC4 maybe used by more folks out there, but it's too klunky for the application developer market and less stable that OpenSuSE. And app-development is where the real cash is made.

Novell, aside from focusing on a couple of markets only needs to increase [kernel] performance as SuSE (and openSuSE) are much more polished for a enterprise environment that RH. I find that application development is much easier on SuSE where kernel dev is easier on FC4. I picked out the F/OSS projects only because companies are moving to the model of developing against the 'F/OSS' version and then deploying on the paid 'OSS' version, hence delaying the licensing/service purchase. It makes sense since if forces the developer and vendor share the risks and have mutual interests to succeed.