And to think that the Linux community at large was overjoyed at this move! There is no bigger bunch of suckers around.

Dell, the man that is, was merely providing himself with a figleaf, albeit something much smaller than the one Naomi Watts used to cover her vital parts in We Don't Live Here Anymore.

Plans are now said to be afoot for Dell to dip its toes into the Microsoft-Novell axis; in truth, this axis needed a third member to meet the requirements of the definition set out by old man Dubya some years ago.

Dell is set to reveal that it will distribute Novell's SUSE Linux enterprise server along with Windows Server, the Boston Globe has reported.

The Globe quotes Rick Becker, vice president of solutions at Dell, as saying that the company would provide the engineers who would actually put these solutions (that's the word they always use) together. It's always a solution - even though there was no problem to solve.

It's now clear why Dell decided to sell Ubuntu on some machines; I'd like to see the people who lauded this move, now come out and criticise Dell for snuggling up to Novell. They have no foot on which to stand.

At the other end of the spectrum there was one conspiracy theorist who had postulated that Microsoft had put Dell up to the Ubuntu move; the way this theory ran, Dell would make a half-assed effort to sell Ubuntu boxes, the whole effort would fail and then nobody would have any more reason to complain about big hardware vendors not trying to push Linux.

It is clear now that this snuggling up to Novell is the quid pro quo which Microsoft wanted - else how could Dell ever think it could cut what are more or less umbilical ties?

There's a big lesson in this for a lot of people. I hope they will learn it and learn it well.{moscomment}

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