sontek ( John M. Anderson )

Aaron Toponce has posted up a poll on his blog here and I wanted to cover some of the hypocrisies in the post and express my own feelings.

I think Novell has done nothing but good things for the open source community by employing some of the best and brightest developers around the world to help develop some of the most innovative applications on the Linux desktop (Tomboy, Banshee, F-Spot, Open Office, Evolution, Compiz, AppArmor, and GNOME) and have even more great products coming down the line like Giver and Banter. They also provide us with a great distribution in openSUSE with features that no other distribution has, such as the SLAB menu, openSUSE build service, 1-Click Install and the codecs installer.

They also employ the kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman (the maintainer of PCI, USB, I²C, driver core and the sysfs kernel) and are allowing him to improve hardware compatibility in Linux by running the Linux Driver Project.

So, to cast my vote, It would be a dream come true to work for such a great company like Novell.

And in response to his poll:

1. Novell has made a reputation for itself by laying off employees at a whim, with the AppArmor devs being the most recent example.
   1. Sun does the same thing, its part of owning a large corporation. And there are many reasons for layoffs, it doesn’t make anyone evil.
2. Sun has opened up nearly all of it’s Solaris operating system. Coming from a Solaris background in the early days, this is cool.
   1. How is “nearly” open source better than being completely open source like Novell is with SUSE?
3. Even though Novell apologized to the community for its agreement with Microsoft, knowing that they could be swallowed up any day now by the Redmond giant makes me nervous.
   1. Sun made a deal with Microsoft years ago:
      http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/sun_microsoft.html
      http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/apr04/04-02SunAgreementPR.mspx
4. Sun seems to have a promising future, where Novell seems to be riding the razors edge. I guess time will only tell there, however.
   1. This is just FUD/speculation, but I would have to disagree, openSUSE is looking better than ever and same goes with the rest of the products developed at Novell, I think nothing but great things are to come from them.
5. Sun has said, that if Microsoft goes on a patent litigation rampage, Sun will pull out it’s portfolio protecting Linux users.
   1. Novell has a policy for this http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent/ and since a majority of their business is invested in Linux and Open Source, why should we doubt them? Especially when they haven’t done anything to make us doubt them.

I would also recommend reading this article which describes the SuSE take over by Novell and how they have helped the open source community.