First of all, I think that we have a reasonable mix of “Stick with what already works” and…

SLES still uses XFree86 while whole community uses (and contributes to) X.org. The same for the RPM software. And more one example or another I can’t remember right now.

With regard to the “uncommon interpretation of standards” I’d like to point…

Thats why I said “uncommon”. It is wierd to install Gnome and KDE under /opt. BTW, /opt is in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard but it was included for backwards compatibility and for third party SW makers (SUSE can’t be third party for their own distro). Modern software provided by the software packager (the distribution) should not use /opt or /usr/local. So yes, using /opt does not violate the standard, but is wierd for SuSE to use it.

As for the claim that naming conventions on the SUSE product have some “SuSE” signature. What files are you referring to here?

There is the SuSE.config file under /etc. There are some fonts named SUSE Arial, SUSE Times, etc. This is not portable.

I think the statement that we don’t ship all source packages is not true…

I was not talking about proprietary packages, but the open source ones. I needed several times, but could never find on SUSE’s public FTP servers the source-RPMs for packages as the kernel, libc or others for non-popular paltforms as IBM iSeries, pSeries and zSeries.

For proprietary stuff, the no-source-RPM (source RPMs without the actual source, but only the spec file and patches written by SUSE) is expected to be freely available.

Anyway, SLES and SLED are great products !

With regard to the “uncommon interpretation of standards” I’d like to point out that we pass LSB 3.1 or LSB 3.0 with our products. This was verified by running the LSB testsuite. I’d interpret that as adhering to the standards.

As for the claim that naming conventions on the SUSE product have some “SuSE” signature. What files are you referring to here?

I think the statement that we don’t ship all source packages is not true for the Open Source software we are shipping. There are some cases like proprietary firmware or Novell proprietary software that is bundled mainly with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop where shipping the sources is not an option.

But all those add functionality on top of the otherwise completely Open Source product that Red Hat just doesn’t have. In my humble opinion this should not speak against us in a direct comparison.

If you are aware of any Open Source package that we don’t make sources available for and Red Hat does, please give me a note and we will fix that.

Sobre este assunto, vale lembrar que a distribuição mais popular é o Red Hat e a segunda, o Debian (segundo o Netcraft). Apesar das tentativas da Novell, o mercado “Enterprise” continua preferindo, em peso, a Red Hat.