Speaking to ZDNet Asia last week, Maarten Koster, the newly-appointed president of Novell Asia-Pacific, noted that the company positions itself in the market differently from its rivals.
"You've got Red Hat as a pure open source company, and you've got Microsoft as a [commercial] license-based company," Koster said. "The reality is, most Novell customers run a mixed-source IT environment."
He added that Novell sees itself a mixed-source company that provides Linux as a "base building block", together with identity and resource management products that manage a hotchpotch of proprietary and open source software within an IT infrastructure. Although Novell's market positioning might turn off some quarters in the open source community, Koster asserted that "Linux and the open source community is an important part of what we do...and we will not ignore them".
Open source groups such as Samba, have openly criticized the patent-related part of the deal. Last week, Jeremy Allison, a high-profile Samba developer, resigned from Novell and will resume his Samba work at Google instead.
News source: ZDNet
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