14 DAY TRIAL // The Novell director of product marketing, Linux, and open platform solutions, Justin Steinman, claims that Red Hat's latest release, Enterprise Linux 5, is very similar to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10, released a year ago.
"The Red Hat desktop looks a lot like the SUSE desktop [so] where is Red Hat's contribution to desktop software? Look at the Red Hat desktop and there's not a lot of new stuff there", said Steinman. Recently, Oracle expressed its intentions to offer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux by admitting the popularity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux among corporate customers. Regarding Oracle's decision to support its own Unbreakable Linux based on Red Hat's code base, Steinman said Oracle is optimizing its distribution for running Oracle. Justin Steimen made comments on Novell's development of the OpenGL-accelerated 3D desktop effects software Compiz and the fact that Novell supports Linux, Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and the pending Longhorn server release as opposite to Red Hat which supports only Red Hat.
Steinman has also announced the upcoming update to its SUSE Linux line, which follows to be released as a "service pack" during the next days.
"We've also taken the opportunity to add new features like Xen 3.0.4, and Xen on the desktop, and updated the desktop menu based on user feedback," he said. "We're in conversations with HP, Dell, and Lenovo and they are all eager to do a desktop pre-load. The only question is who is going to move first", mentioned Steinman.
Novell and Microsoft have signed a partnership in order to better bind their respective products and remove legal concerns over using open source and Microsoft software together. This stirred a lot of controversies among the open source community, Red Hat considering that there shouldn't be a "tax" applied to interoperability, which is driven by open standards. Steinman claimed that this agreement could only bring benefits to the customers. He mentioned that any code made by Novell as part of the agreement will be open source. Microsoft though, will not make Windows source code open even though the adaptor between SUSE and Windows is 100% open source.