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

well

[know1]

"If you're not making them money, you're not going to get their ear"
they make that sound like a bad thing, there aren't many for profit organisations that are any different i would imagine.

The second comment in the blog has it right

[ReformedExCon]

Redhat is where it is because it is the company that employs the people who write Linux, most notably Alan Cox. There is a lot of code in the Linux kernel and periphery that simply wouldn't be there if Redhat wasn't around to pay these programmers to put it in there.

So if we consider the authors of the source as the ultimate support channel, then Redhat will always filter its way to the top. Throw in the existing momentum behind the platform, both on the "child" distros side and the business side, and you've got an unstoppable (for now) juggernaut. Want embedded Linux? Montavista's got a custom RedHat Linux for you. Want some esoteric hardware supported? Redhat's gone through the trouble to port a driver for you.

It's so far ahead of every other commercial distribution that it's not even funny.

Is it ahead/better than non-commercial distros like Debian? No, probably not. But they aren't really competing against each other.

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.

Re:The second comment in the blog has it right

[PimpBot]

Is it ahead/better than non-commercial distros like Debian? No, probably not.

This line rubs me the wrong way. The reason why folks choose commercial distros like RedHat or Suse is because they are better for what people need -- they provide a supported, easier to configure setup which allows them to solve whatever problem they or their organization have with a minimum of fuss. Distriubtions like Debian/Ubuntu/Gentoo/etc. are useful for the tweakers of the world (and yes, given enough gumption could be used to replace RHEL/SES), but they're not ready out of the proverbial box.

Am I missing something here? Is there some other reason why Debian et al is better?

Ecosystem.

[bubulubugoth]

Partners are needed for having a good sustainable bussines ecosystem.

There is the need of a supply chain. And Novell has a much more longer experience than Redhat, it also has a long standing user base around the world, there still are a lot of novell 486/3.11/4.0 running, 5 to 10 users, and not wanting to go with Microsoft.

Novell and SuSe, also spend lots of money at developing OSS, ximian, mono, X, drivers, kernel patches, kde and gnome stuff, also redhat.

And even more... SuSe born in germany, and it has a huge user base at europe, Redhat has born at U.S.A. and there is a LOT of countries, that doesnt want to be working with U.S.A. enforsable companies... so there is the reason why, at Linux there will be very, very, very hard to have a "single vender Enterprise distribution"...

Re:For profits are like that

[wolf31o2]

The Gentoo Foundation is a not-for-profit company. We are not a charity. Donations to Gentoo cannot be written off. Our goals have nothing to do with making money and everything to do with making software.