Novell reveals its tactics for taking on Red Hat

A blog post made by Novell late last month - accusing one of its largest competitors in the commercial Linux space, Red Hat, of deliberately obfuscating its code to hamper third-party support efforts - raised some eyebrows in the community, so we sat down with the post's author, Michael Applebaum, to find out what's what.

Applebaum's post accused Red Hat of getting "a little defensive" over Novell's poaching of its enterprise Linux customers, following the company's addition of commercial Red Hat support to its portfolio back in 2009. It's a move that Novell knew would raise Red Hat's hackles, but one which the company claims came about purely through customer demand.

"We had a number of customer who were in the process of migrating their systems over from Red Hat to SUSE Linux Enterprise," Applebaum explained, "and they don't do that overnight. They have a migration plan, and that may ask for a period of two or three years, and they wanted the ability to move fully to Novell as their supplier of software code as well as for the core system - to have a period of time over which they could make that migration."