Five reasons to migrate from RHEL to SUSE

In a post that is sure to generate its fair share of headlines and “constructive criticism,” Ross Brunson over at the Linux in Novell’s East Region generated a list of the top five reason to migrate from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to SUSE Enterprise Linux.

Yeah, I know. I could envision the flame war comments and trackback posts before I even finished reading the headline too.

But more seriously, Brunson dishes out the points using categories that I think any IT manager out there today could understand: cost, management, interoperability, customer satisfaction and deployment.

Here’s a sample, using an example that is core to the entire “Microsoft-Novell partnership is good for you, really!” argument:

Interoperability - Novell started life in the pre-Open Source days, it’s got a huge patent portfolio, years of closed-source product development and many customers who use those products. Red Hat was begun to be and is aggressively Open Source, even when it doesn’t make sense, they have to adhere to that ideal. Novell enters into and works hard on agreements that increase it’s interoperability with other environments and makes it easy to just get things working. Novell’s agreement with Microsoft is a good example of two organizations that aggressively compete also setting aside differences to make the customers life easier.

There are four more where that came from, so get yourself over to Ross’s post for more information on those other topics, including YasT and virtualization.

Do you Agree? Disagree? Have you experienced first hand the benefits of Novell’s “deal with th devil?” Even one year later, this deal still invokes a religious fervor amongst the Linux community (although its noticeably less fervor-ish that it was in November 2006).