Novell's Linux Business Takes a Seat At the Grown-Up Table

CNet is reporting that while Novell still has a long way to go before they start making Red Hat nervous, they have at least gotten a seat at the grown-up table. Reporting 31% year-over-year growth in their Linux business, Novell attributes very little of this success to their Microsoft partnership, looking to their Redmond connection mainly for interoperability work. "Novell's core Linux business is growing. By 'core,' I mean that our non-Microsoft- related Linux business is growing. These are Suse Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions sold directly by the Novell sales force or by our channel partners, without any Microsoft certificates or Microsoft salespeople involved. However, the important thing is that our total revenue picture for Suse Linux Enterprise is growing, as our customers increasingly don't distinguish. As we've said before, Microsoft offers an alternate avenue for purchasing subscriptions but we are focused on growth of the whole category."

Comments

Geez, it took you that long to figure it out?

[Stu101]

We are late arrivals in linux land. However we are deploying a new suse server a week to replace NT servers. We have gone from zero to 35% in little over 3 months. It really is linux for the enterprise made easy. And whats even better, the toolsets are free, opensuse is free, and no shitty activation codes. It's all gravy, to use a bad term ;)

Re:Frosty Posts

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Speaking of security, I kinda like 2 things about Apparmor vs SELinux (which oddly, Canonical chose for Ubuntu, over SELinux). One, the control follows the relative path to the file as opposed to the inode. Now, some may like it the other way around, but if you update the executable, as long as the path stays the same, no changes have to be made. This increases the chance of an administrator NOT forgetting to update the settings for the restrictions during an update or for a patch where they have not gotten all the details. The other reason...It is not written by the NSA. Call me nutty, but I don't exactly like the involvement of government in my software.

Times are changing

[blind biker]

Do you remember the days when any company that stroke a deal with Microsoft, died a horrible and agonizing death? Well, look at this deal with Novell: it seems this is the first time a company pulled a fast one - on Microsoft! Novell saw a small opportunity to make a bit of money and offered to Microsoft something Novell must have known is worthless and impossible: the proprietarization of Linux. Microsoft was desperate enough that it wanted to believe this baloney and Novell was more than happy to oblige and feed them the BS, making a few bucks in the process, and attracting (extremely few) additional customers. Not too much profit, but every little helps, and you won't spit on it, especially if you give NOTHING in return, like Novell did to Microsoft.

Microsoft is getting sloppy and silly. These are indeed new times.