A good start for the New Year.

A New Year rant.

This is just a quick one for the folks at Novell. They have taken some brave decisions in the past year and it they have started a process which is going to completely change their business.

However, despite the fact that several parts of the company have changed not all of the departments have adopted this new attitude, mainly the folks who send out the disks.

Novell are currently the large player in an environment dominated by small startups invigorated by the open source marketplace. Novell need to step-up to the challenge and undergo a change in attitude if they are going to compete in this arena.

Basic to this is getting your product out to those who will use it. That is not happening.

I defended Novell before when people were commenting on their failure to deliver disks for the Novell Nterprise Linux Services Evaluation Kit.

But now it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the Novell Linux Desktop. We went to the trouble of ordering two disks from a supplier to be told that these disks had to be sold in batches of twelve. Getting the media has also been a troublesome task, and finally the downloads seem to constantly fail and deliver bad images. The last I would blame on my connection or download agent except that this seems consistent with several organistaions I have talked to.

So Novell, get your act together. Figure out what you want to be.

If you are going to be an Open Source Company – then start acting like one.