14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, a top Red Hat executive accused Novell of reselling the beta version of Red Hat's open source code.
The dispute relates to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 (SLERT 10), which was released two weeks ago. SLERT 10 is aimed at Wall Street traders and other organizations that need real-time functionality. This type of software can carry out operations within a guaranteed time frame.
Red Hat launched a week ago, on December 5th, its own version of real-time Linux, called Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, RealTime, Grid) having the same market as target. This distribution is equipped with features like high-speed inter-application messaging, based on the Advanced Queuing Protocol (AMQP), distributed workloads management, task scheduling across both local and remote grids and it can use cloud capacity from Amazon EC2. Red Hat collaborated with the University of Wisconsin and its computing project, Condor, to offer the distributed computing capabilities to MRG.
When Red Hat released MRG in London, Scott Crenshaw, line of business VP, said that their rival used beta versions of MRG's beta code in its offering. He said that "they haven't contributed a line of code". The result of this change of code is cutting off all of Novell's prior users from previous versions.
Crenshaw said that Red Hat's first customer was the U.S Navy, adding that "They approached us a few years ago for a system that could run whole ships, weapons control, the lot."
The anterior versions of Novell's SLERT had some Linux kernel tweaks made by developers from both Novell and Concurrent Computer. The latest edition uses real-time extensions to the Linux 2.6.22 kernel, developed by key members of the Linux and real-time operating system communities. These extensions were put together into a patch bearing the name CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch set.