How popular has SLES and SLED been since they were launched mid last year?

SLES and SLED – and other products – our real time product, an integrated web stats with IBM, a thin client, a retail client – the whole broad SLE broad platform – not just SLED and SLES. There have been more than 25m hits to the novell.com/linux site since the deal was done. There have been more than 1.3m downloads of the SLES/SLED platform. Since July. Revenue is growing. All in all things are looking up. It’s all very optimistic.

Justin, given that Oracle has started selling their own version of Red Hat, it’s clear that Oracle likes to “fork” people around. Could Oracle could do an Oracle SuSe?

Sure they could but why would they want more than one Linux distribution? We’re tried to position SuSe as heterogeneous – SAP, J2ee etc – you’ll want to run all of those on SuSe Linux Enterprise.

Justin, now a question from iTWire Editor, Stan Beer. He asks how the discussions with Dell are coming along to release preconfigured desktops with SuSe. Rumors are that Dell is ready to release Linux desktop boxes this month – will SuSe or Ubuntu be the first distro?

Can’t comment on that. I can say that we are in very serious discussions with Dell, Lenovo and HP. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a pre-configured Linux desktop to come out in the next two months from ‘somebody’. We’re at the table with each of those hardware vendors – others as well, but those are the three that are closest right now.

We already have Linux shipping on a bunch of whitebox vendors – and even Sun is supporting SLED on their workstations. When it comes to enterprise linux adoption, we’re leading the way with that. Peugeot,the car company – they have 20,000 SuSe Linux Enterprise Desktops, they embraced the entire desktop to data center story – 20,000 desktops, 2500 servers. Nice win for us.

So, Justin, are you ultimately expecting to be on all three PC vendors with a Linux offering (from Dell, HP and Lenovo), whether they go with you first or not?

Exactly. It’ll depend on whether or not they want to go with a consumer or business offering first. They might want to go after consumers first – if so, they might choose Ubuntu, if it’s business, they might choose us, but it’s all still in discussion, and nothing can be confirmed at this stage.

Justin, now some questions from iTWire’s Linux Guru, Sam Varghese. Sam says to ask “what Novell plans to do after the GPLv3 comes into force and a lot of software which belongs to the Free Software Foundation is put under that licence making it impossible for Novell to use because of the deal they cut with Microsoft? Novell can use the earlier versions and hire developers to work on them in order to keep up - in other words, run their own forks of a number of projects.”

Right now, the GPLv3 is still in discussion. The latest draft of GPLv3 is in discussion. According to the latest version that was published on, I think, March 28, under that version, Novell will be able to ship Linux under a GPLv3. Period. There’s nothing in the current draft of GPLv3 that prevents Novell from shipping Linux. What about forking? There’s no need to have that discussion because the current draft of GPLv3 allows us to ship Linux. It’s still in discussion though so we have to wait and see what the final version is.

Justin, the second question from Sam is: “When is Novell going to reveal what role Mono (the open source implementation of the .NET development environment) is going to play in Novell's grand plan to become the top Linux reseller?”

That’s an easy one. Mono is absolutely a key component of Novell’s grand plan to become the no.1 Linux reseller. It’s why we invest millions of dollars a year in Linux development and have 20 Mono developers on staff. Mono will enable you to run .NET apps on Linux and if Mono is part of the SuSe Linux enterprise platform and it’s not part of the Red Hat platform because they choose not to ship it, that provides yet another reason for customers to choose SuSe Linux enterprise. I want to make clear that mono is 100% open source. Red Hat could choose to include it. But they choose not to.

And Sam’s third question is “Whether Justin has any figures to prove that Novell has indeed
benefitted from getting into bed with Microsoft?”

$91m of Linux in the first quarter of which roughly $70m came from MS. We said that we expected to sell 70,000 subscriptions in year 1 through MS. 70,000 per year for 5 years. As of the latest public figures which were released roughly in the middle of February, we had already sold 40,000 certificates. We were past the half way point less than half way into the year. We’ll be having another update on the number of subscriptions we sold through the next couple of weeks. We have to make public statements through the proper channels because of Wall St tracking so check in a couple of weeks for the most up to date figures.

Plus the stock price is up, roughly up $1, or roughly 18% up.

TO SEE THE CONCLUSION to this article, including questions I posed that I found on the 'Boycott Novell' website, please go to the conclusion on page 3 NOW.