A call by Novell’s CEO for a standardized way to certify Linux applications Wednesday was subsequently greeted with skepticism by a high-ranking official at rival Linux distributor Red Hat. During a morning keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Novell President and CEO Ron Hovsepian said Novell was working with industry players on a plan to streamline certification of Linux applications. Red Hat’s Michael Evans, vice president of corporate development at the company, said afterward that liked the idea. But he expressed doubts about the effort since Hovsepian was involved.“Personally, that he’s the guy that did the deal with Microsoft, I’m suspicious of things he says,” Evans said. Evans was referring to an agreement forged between the companies in which the vendors agreed not to sue each other’s customers over any intellectual property infringement issues. The two companies exchanged monies in return for these covenants not to sue the other’s customers. Microsoft later alleged that Linux and other open source software violate 235 Microsoft patents, although the company has not detailed those patents publicly. The Novell-Microsoft arrangement amounts to a taxation of Novell’s Suse Linux software by Microsoft, Evans said. “It’s a taxation because there’s a fee being paid by Novell to Microsoft for every copy shipped,” Evans said.The majority of the open source world thinks the Novell-Microsoft deal is a bad one, said Evans. Red Hat will not do a similar deal with Microsoft, he said. Novell has said it makes more money on the arrangement than it pays out. Evans also said any plan to standardize Linux application certifications must be “grounded in reality” and that the Linux Standard Base project has been productive in the area of standards certification. Other than Red Hat and Novell both participating in Linux Standard Base, Evans was not aware of any approaches by Novell about the application certification plan.Evans also commented on impacts of Oracle’s effort to lure Red Hat users to Oracle technical support services. Evans said the company still has partnerships with Oracle and that Red Hat recently reported retaining 99 percent of its support customers, with a lone holdout just delaying a renewal. Red Hat has no numbers on the amount of Red Hat users who simply downloaded the company’s Linux distribution and then sought out Oracle for support. Technology Industry