Novell guns for Red Hat

The open source world isn't all sweetness and light. Novell is trying to take business from the market leader in Linux servers, Red Hat - with a switchover campaign.

As in many such campaigns, Novell is offering incentives to companies that decide to move to its product. The interesting thing is that a major one of those incentives, is short-term technical support for the user's Red Hat operating systems during the switchover.

In anything but open source, that would be a very difficult ptomise to make, points out John Fontana at Network World. Patches for proprietary software are commercial products, just like the software they patch; but there's nothing at all to stop Novell from distributing open source patches to the open source Red Hat operating system.

If nothing else, the move will increase competition and keep Red Hat looking at the terms of its own support contracts.