Linux news will shake Microsoft
The earth moved last week. The seismic shock was felt most keenly in Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft Corp. executives bask in world dominance.
Red Hat Inc. announced it was dropping the desktop version of its high-profile Linux operating system to concentrate on corporate customers with its Enterprise Linux line, first released last year. And within days, Novell Inc. announced that it had purchased SuSE Linux AG, Red Hat's most important competitor, based in Nuremberg, Germany.
Initially, Red Hat's decision dismayed open-source devotees. The company, based in North Carolina and co-founded by Canadian Robert Young, sent them a letter stating all versions up to 8.0 would cease to be supported at the end of the year, and the latest version, 9.0, would not be supported after April 30. It did throw its clients a bone, however -- a slightly different version of Red Hat Linux, called Fedora, has already been released as Fedora Core 1, aimed at the hobbyist and independent-developer market.
The Novell purchase of SuSE, however, proved to be more dramatic. Novell, which specializes in networking, or middleware, instantly catapulted the small but respected SuSE Linux system into the front lines of competition. Novell chief executive officer Jack Messman remarked the deal would make Novell the only billion-dollar software company with a Linux distribution and the worldwide technical staff to support it.
