Red Hat exec says Novell sells beta code

Red Hat has an announcement tomorrow that we'll be telling you about in due course. In the meantime, here's a snippet: a Red Hat vice president slated Novell's real-time SUSE Linux which launched last week, saying it's code that Red Hat would only treat as beta - and Red Hat should know because it wrote most of it.

"Till last week, Novell sold a Real Time system that forked their kernel," said Scott Crenshaw, VP of Red Hat's infrastructure business unit, on a visit to London today. Last week, Novell announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time (SLERT), using open source Linux code that Crenshaw says was "80 percent" written by Red Hat people. "We welcome Novell to the real-time community," he said, slightly stingingly: ""We look forward to them making contributions to it."

"They've put out an unstable variant," said Crenshaw. "It doesn't help your customers to ship unstable code - though there may be a market in it." Crenshaw believes that real-time code is significant, and enterprise Linuxes should move towards offering real-time support as standard, but he believes the real-time features used by Novell are only good enough for beta testing at this stage.

It could all be sour grapes because Novell got there first, of course, or could it be a teaser for a forthcoming Red Hat announcement...?