Novell, Red Hat and Gartner war with Facebook for PR flop award

Save the fear leader. Save the hurled

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View → More by this author

Published Friday 7th December 2007 23:44 GMT

Radio Reg Is there a PR professional decent enough to join the Open Season crew? Like you, we thought "no." But, as it turns out, Lonn Johnston from Page One PR is all class and just as full of vitriol as the rest of us.

Lonn helped Open Season get back on track after a brief hiatus. (A number of you actually were kind enough to write, wondering what happened to us.) The usual crew - me, Matt Asay and Dave Rosenberg - went after Novell in Episode 7. Then we went after Novell some more. And finished off the Novell bashing with some Novell bashing.

Next it was Red Hat's turn, as we wondered why the company tries to keep itself such an industry secret. You're a fine company, Red Hat. Speak up!

No show ripping on Novell and Red Hat would be complete without a helping of cynicism directed at Sun Microsystems, Facebook and the masters of the felch spoon over at Gartner. In all honesty, Matt and Dave probably need to stay on Gartner's good side, so they can appear in a magic quadrant or two. I need no such help. So attribute all angry comments to me.

As always, the full details on the rabble rousing are provided below for your consumption.

And now on with the show.

Open Season - Episode 7

The faithful can grab the Ogg Vorbis file here, and those plagued by low-bandwidth can catch a smaller, crappier quality show here.

You can subscribe to the show on iTunes here or grab the Arse feed here.

Show Notes - Novell wounded

Page One PR takes the show down a notch
Novell with layoffs
Novell charged by Red Hat with releasing buggy code
All agree - Novell is frustrating to watch
Lonn has a secret Linux kernel contribution survey coming - Red Hat and Novell are neck-and-neck at about 10 per cent
Last but not least, Novell delays SEC filings