Novell hits at Red Hat's real-time rant

Red Hat complained this week that Novell hadn't contributed enough to real time Linux, and was launching code developed by Red Hat that should still be in beta - Novell has responded.

"Novell is shipping tested and enterprise-hardened Linux with real time capabilities," says Kevin Barney over at Novell's Open PR blog. "Just because Red Hat is again late to market (see enterprise Linux desktop, Xen virtualization, etc.) doesn’t mean [SUSE] Linux contains “beta code.” SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time is already run in production environments, providing real services to real customers like Thomson Financial."

Furthermore, Novell has contributed "a vast amount of code" to real time Linux, says Barney, along with others, and points to the real time community mailing list for proof.

Two issues arise from all this.

1. According to Barney, some sites were so confused about the nature of open source, they misreported the whole thing - saying that Red Hat was objecting to Novell's use of the code, something Novell is perfectly entitled to do under the open source licence. We don't have to explain what open source is all over again, do we?

2. What do we mean by real time? A couple of people have suggested to me that what real time kernels, like Lynx have hitherto been specialised beasts - are Red Hat and Novell actually offering something that's just a (major) step along the spectrum towards predictable response time?