There is a follow up on this item, check it out here.

There is a huge discussion going on since Novell sent out an email about “change of support” (starting somewhere the end of this year).

The following is what Danita Zanre said about this on her blog. I fully agree with her.

Last week, Novell sent an email to its partners that has suddenly become a HUGE source of traffic on Novell’s Community Chat forum, as well as various mailing lists such as the NGWList, TTP, etc.

The text of this email is available here.

Essentially, the policy states that patches for most products (other than security patches) and access to the KnowledgeBase for current Novell products will require the purchase of maintenance on your Novell products.

Colleen O’Keefe, a Senior VP at Novell, has tried to justify this in her post on the matter by suggesting that the “burden” of paying for services like support packs should not be borne solely by current maintenance customers.

To that we whole-heartedly say “hear, hear”! Services like SUPPORT PACKS should be included in the price of the software, not by paying maintenance. Customers expect that the software they purchase works, and if it does not, the idea that the customer should PAY to get a fix for the bugs is outrageous.

If you are indeed “mad as hell” like we are, and you haven’t decided to just throw in the towel, let Novell know you’re not going to take it!

While posting in the public forums is a good “visible” way to get your opinions counted, please also consider sending some email. Some folks who would probably be interested are:

John.Dragoon; Colleen.Okeefe; Jeff.Jaffe

Of course, all of those above are portions of email addresses at novell dot com (I’m being a good Internet citizen here and avoiding putting their actual email addresses in the post for the bots to read – I don’t want them having to wade through a lot of spam to get to the important email messages you WILL be sending them!).

If you are a concerned customer, consultant, employee or supporter of Novell in any way, please take the time to let Novell know that this is a really bad idea!

Thanks.

Danita
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