With the recent (& much blogged & written about) moves by Novell & RedHat taking up postures in the Enterprise Linux market, the game now seems to be a clear two-horse race between Novell and RedHat. Novell a well-known entity in the Enterprise computing market while RedHat is probably the best known name in the Linux business
Prima facie, if RedHat does not find a big player to back up its moves (say Oracle ??? or some such player), it would find fighting with Novell (duly backed by IBM) a rather difficult task to handle. With SuSE and Ximian, Novell has enough ammunition to attack the Enterprise Server as well as the Desktop market.
How this pans out would be very interesting to observe
Based on the current problems I'm having trying to get a stable SuSE 9.0 system running after purchasing the pro version and the instant jump tech support made to blame the problem on power management, which isn't supported on a new install; I suspect Red Hat will win the war in the long run. I may be wrong having nothing to do with Novell in all my years of computing, but I seem to remember that they have had support problems in the past. And as far as IBM is concerned a large portion of their revenue has always come from support so they probably are going to change anything. This may endear them to large enterprizes, but with the current financial situation being what it is I doubt it.
Posted by: Jim Hurley | January 10, 2004 at 09:10 AM