In our recent interview with Karl Fischer, one of the topics we touched on was brand recognition in relation to Linux adoption.

Back in the day when I started my IT career, Novell Netware was still a contender in the server room along side Unix.  

Today, there is still strong Novell brand recognition in government and business, Though they are basically closed source, in South Africa, organizations still have an affinity for Novell products. 

Examples which Karl shared from his experience as Open Source Migration Manager at SA's Department of Science & Technology included:

• It was easier for him to walk into a presentation with a boxed product such as OpenSuse 11.3 which also comes with 90 days of end user installation support ($65)  http://en.opensuse.org/Buy_openSUSE 
• Bringing a burned CD of a 'free' operating system with a name such as Lucid Lynx to the same type of presentation was a challenge .
• He found the adoption of Open Office was more successful if he used the Novell branded version.

Does this perception stem from the historical use of Novell on the enterprise side by large organizations?  It may also lend itself to a sense of stability, though industry insiders know that Novell has struggled since their partnership with Microsoft.

 In my recent work, it is Ubuntu that has the brand recognition on the desktop. Actually I have heard from clients in Pakistan and Ecuador that they have purchased machines pre-installed with Ubuntu.

On a side note, Canonical has added a tracking package on OEM machines running 10.04  that sends a 'I'm alive' ping which is added to daily cron jobs to help determine how many installs stay live over time. Ubuntu OEM installs