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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."
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.