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COAS
Caldera, a prominent Linux distribution and development company, is developing the Caldera Open Administration System (COAS), to provide a comprehensive and coherent framework for implementation of Linux system administration mechanisms. Among other things, COAS is designed to provide a plug-in framework for administrative-task modules which are written in Python or C++ (or both).

Damn you SCO! Defiler of technology! Damn you to hell!
(For those who don't understand, Caldera is a product of SCO. SCO is the recent bastardizer of Linux. EOF)

COAS
Caldera, a prominent Linux distribution and development company, is developing the Caldera Open Administration System (COAS), to provide a comprehensive and coherent framework for implementation of Linux system administration mechanisms. Among other things, COAS is designed to provide a plug-in framework for administrative-task modules which are written in Python or C++ (or both).

Damn you SCO! Defiler of technology! Damn you to hell!
(For those who don't understand, Caldera is a product of SCO. SCO is the recent bastardizer of Linux. EOF)

The Caldera Open Administration System has many of the same goals, but it seems moribund these days. It was quite impressive: being able to configure a multitude of configuration files using a consistent user interface, whether text or graphically based. The "master" configuration file is always the original application's. It's too bad it didn't get more widely adopted. Ideally, each *nix application would ship with a COAS (or similar standardized) format metaconfiguration file that describes its native file format and would allow a high level configuration application to work. That would enable flashy, integrated *nix configuration like the other guys.

It can't be revenues ($3 million in '99) or profits ($9.4 million loss in '99).

Caldera Systems' products would appear to be proprietary Linux ports of Noorda's, I mean, Novell's successful and fast-growing Netware line plus Red Hat-based OpenLinux distro. The Lizard installer (co-developed with TrollTech) seems to have been finally open-sourced last September under TrollTech's QPL but the only reference to COAS licensing seemed to imply that the source will only be released after the administration tools are developed , whatever that means.

Offering only approximately 5% of the stock to the public is a time-tested method of increasing demand by artificially restricting supply. Ray Noorda (holding 73% after IPO) will be laughing all the way to the bank even if the IPO tanks. Even Sun, SCO, Citrix etc. got their pre-IPO shares at $6 a few months ago while TrollTech got theirs via equity swap. However the common man only "wins" if the company is really going to be worth over $1 billion in the not too distant future. Also be warned that daytraders and marketmakers (both well-known market manipulators) may quickly boost the price quite high after opening but they're also able to dump their "holdings" in a split second when the price starts heading south.

Are people even aware that this Caldera Systems, Inc. isn't the same as Caldera, Inc.? Since they took over www.caldera.com from their mother company any references to the latter have been hard to find. At least they're still proudly carrying a link to the Caldera vs. Microsoft (SETTLED!) page, even though the dough went to the old Caldera, Inc. instead. I hope that the DOJ's case will finally produce Microsoft a guilty verdict instead because it would be too painful to see Gates (unrelated tip: try searching Chairman Gates' site for "Linux") proclaiming again how Microsoft has never, ever done anything remotely naughty, how the operating system and Office suite markets are, as always, extremely competitive and how they only settled to be able to better continue innovating for their customers...

Anyways, it will be interesting to see what impact the nouveau rich Caldera Systems, Inc. will have on Red Hat's market valuation and strategies; both of these primarily server and service-oriented companies are going to be accountable for their shareholders' financial well-being. With Caldera Systems, Inc. IPO already priced above Corel's market valuation perhaps Red Hat should reconsider strengthening their position by buying out Corel (currently valued at only 10% of RHAT market cap), selling Corel's investments in other companies for cash and then creating a number of subsidiaries with their own lucrative IPO's of the Corel product lines as e.g. the WordPerfect Office Corp., the Corel Draw and Publishing Corp., the Red Corel Linux OS for desktop etc. Say what you will but competition between these Linux-based companies is going to get started.

Caldera Open Administration System (COAS) was supposed to be a GUI and CLI tool for administration, with the possibility of adding plug-ins. Unfortunately, they decided that it got too complex and canned it.

http://www.coas.org

Please read the purpose of COAS to see what Linux administration is all about... And why these discussions begin.

There is definately a need for a GUI tool for desktop users, something to compete with Window's Control Panel. A unified point of access for configuration. This is not a debate of GUI vs. CLI, nor about newbies vs. sysadmins. There is a clear need for a single point of access for all administration/configuration related tasks. Whether this is via text files, a written GUI or a HTTP port is less relevant.
Desktop users need a point-'n-click toy, sysadmins need to be able to script things like mirroring configurations across servers and (re)creating hundreds of users. On NT you have to use Perl or install third-party stuff to do this, the GUI just doesn't work for heavy-league admin tasks.

• Java

  There seems to have been something of a "trainwreck" with respect to Java. There are lots of "nearly done" Java environments out there, including Kaffe, GCJ, Jikes, "Blackdown," and likely others.

  Unfortunately, none are truly useful without some combination of classes (ala GNU Classpath) and some combination of AWT/Swing. And that has been rather less rapidly forthcoming in the "reasonably free form" that is necessary in order for it to be ubiquitous enough for people to really use it to deploy applications, or to use it as a layer on which to build further infrastructure like EJB.

  Is anybody near to deploying a complete "libre" Java for Linux?

• System Config Tools

  There's Linuxconf. There's COAS. There's cfengine. And Ganymede (tho it needs Java; see above...) and bunches of other system config tools one one degree of incompleteness or another.

  Big, expensive things like UniCentre are also getting ported, although they're not likely of great interest on the home front.

  Is there any intent to try to have some useful protocols to allow intercommunications of some of these systems, or to perhaps pick an existing one rather than recreating the wheel?

• Testing/Standards

  There has been some lipservice about Linux Standard Base (LSB), but it is not evident that anyone has either deployed substantially changed systems as a result of attempting to conform to some common guidelines, nor to actually provide ways of conforming systems to standards.

  There are lots of tools out there to run systems through automated test suites; that is apparently one of the major tasks of one ACLs for Linux project. In other contexts, we find ANSI Common LISP Conformance Tests. The folks at Cygnus run EGCS through testing, and provide EGCS Test Suite Results. Greg is being used to validate that GnuStep conforms to its documentation.

  ... And every "dot zero" release of Red Hat Linux fills many with fear as it tends to at least appear undertested.

  And then there's the Extreme Programming approach (particularly associated with Smalltalk) where one of the core requirements is of Continuous Integration Tests that are integrated in with the development process.

  But it is, often enough, not clear that people are depending in much more than merely the notion that Because it's Open Source, naturally bags of people will want to spend their weekends testing my code.

  We badly need to have some regression tests so that some testing takes place as distributions are constructed. Debian does some of this with dpkg-related tools; it is highly unfortunate that similar tools have not cropped up around RPM.

  Question: What are you doing to help contribute to the public body of test suite code?

NDS and other Directory Services may not matter much to nickle and dime shops, but anyone who has to manage more than 10 networked devices can appreciate the ability to do so from a single administration front-end to directory services

Novell has been doing this for years. The only thing keeping Novell from dying as a company, is that they keep making their network adminstration easier through directory services. With NDS 8, Novell Netware 5.0, and Zero Effort Networks (ZEN), you can administer just about every device on your network in about every way imaginable.

Those that have implemented NDS the right way just can't switch to NT, they'd have to increase the number of employees in their IT department by and order of magnitude.

With NDS and ZEN, you can lock down who can login from which specific machines. Have their printers and data resources move automatically based on User and Workstation. Install and distribute software updates. Administer resource quota's, etc. And that is just the start.

With the addition of NDS for UNIX and NT, life is going to get a lot easier for those that have to administer, maintain, and support networks.

I only wish the open source community could deliver 10% of the product that NDS already is. -And I don't mean spending 1000+ hours to configure this-and-that open source tools which already exist... but rather a single intuitive rock-solid directory server with an accompanying intuitive administrative interface.

I had hoped that Caldera's Open Administration System (COAS) would grow to fill this role... but it seems destined to die of neglect and disinterest.

A - The whole work is released under the Gnu Public License (GPL), which makes its development and use available to everyone. It is intended that the development model, copyright use, and licensing be similar to that of the Linux kernel. Just as some drivers for Linux may be released in binary form only, not under the GPL, modules may be written for COAS which are released under a license of the author's choosing. However, the core system will always be available under GPL. Certain major library elements of COAS are released under the LGPL (Library Gnu Public License) to allow developers to write commercial programs on top of the COAS system without encumbering them with GPL restrictions.