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Novell to Ship MySQL With NetWare 6
An anonymous reader writes "Coming close on the heels of their announcement that they've ported PostgreSQL to NetWare, Novell announced today that they will begin shipping MySQL with NetWare 6. Owing to customer and partner doubts about the GPL, Novell has chosen the commercial version of MySQL, rather than the GPL'ed version."
Were they going to ship both, or only ship mysql, and have postgres as a 'supported' but not 'shipped' system?
creation science book
Reading the license term for MySQL it seems pretty clear that Novell has no choice in choosing the license model. According to the terms at the MySQL page, MySQL is only GPL if the whole system is open sourced or GPL:ed. N'est ce pas?
It says it'll ship in 2003, but a beta is available.
WHEN will MySQL 4 get out of 'development' and into 'stable'? The infoworld article was already mentioning MySQL 5, but 4 is still alpha/beta, not 'production', and the 3.23 series seems to be progressing still.
creation science book
This does seem like a pretty big blow to GPL in general - but I figured if anyone would know of good alternatives to Netware, it'd be the dudes at /. - so, honestly - is this the beginning of the end for GPL, or will Novell "correct" their "mistake" (both in quotations, as I don't think I know enough about the behind-the-scenes detail to make a subjective decision like that) with a future update?
I loved Netware 4.11 and think that NDS even then is better than the next two iterations of Active Directory could hope to be.
However, Novell has been doing this "Me too!!!!" thing with bundling stuff for years. Perl, the whole Netscape server, some IBM web thing, etc and it means nothing.
I hate to agree with the trolls, but Novell is dying. There was even an article in the WSJ last Friday about companies trading *below* their hard asset valus, and guess who was on it? Novell was! The Wall Street logic apparently was that trading below asset value was the sign that you were a dead duck and that investors not only didn't think you would do well now, but thought you'd likely go bankrupt, too.
I dislike marketers as much as any programmer, or for that matter, anyone who's had their dinner interrupted by a phone call. But Novell needs better marketing in general. They've got really neat technology, but nobody knows about it. I think that if Novell discovered cold fusion they wouldn't tell anyone. The most they'd do is but a little paper sign on the door of the laboratory saying "cold fusion inside - don't tell anyone."
So, without the proper marketing, I doubt anyone will ever discover that Novell can be a web services platform, or that there's a built-in database that's ready to use.
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
Microsoft announced that Cardfile would be bundled in their next version of Windows.
Here is Novell's press release on the matter. (man their new web site sucks) It appears that earlier reports of PostgreSQL were inaccurate.
Now, what the press release doesn't say is if Novell plans to remove Pervasive/BTrieve from Netware. Netware has always been deeply steeped in Btrieve (an abomination, in my opinion). Indeed Netware 3 through 6 even use BTrieve for the TCP/IP stack. I can't imagine why but, they do.
Did I miss something?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
This is neat-o keen, but exactly how does this convince people who are running NT or Linux servers (and who therefore can *already* get MySQL for free) to go with NetWare?
If I were Novell, I'd be more interested in developing a Samba-style SMB server NLM to try to replace NT file and print servers -- look in any current virus catalog under "Klez" for more details...
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I'm surprised that GNU/RMS hasn't rallied the GNU/FSF and explained the GNU/GPL to them.
Sorry to say (and this is not a flame) but the name Novell brings up connotations of losses in the server OS market, losses in the office suite market, etc. Too bad MySQL will now be associated with it.
Maybe you're right, they need better marketing. And I'll start with the suggestion of a name change. Call it: Improvell!
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Oh, sure, they don't have flashy David Bowie television commercials, etc., but they do a decent amount of marketing. The problem isn't marketing -- the problem is lack of developers.
A couple of years ago, Novell held a developer contest for the best product integrated with NDS. This was at the height of the dotcom boom. The best integrated application award went to a contextless login client extension -- something to make their file system client work better. This was the best showing?
Novell needs developers. They've recently been trying to fix this -- they purchased Silverstream Software to add Java development and business logic to their directory service. Their DirXML and Account Management products are expected to benefit the most from it. Hopefully someone will notice...
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
These financial results show that although Novell is trading below their values, as you said, they are still strong and perhaps on the road to recovery.
People have cried the Novell is dead/dying mantra since the release of NT 4.0 yet, their still plugging along. Don't count them dead yet.
I remember needing DOS to install Netware, and it just added networking to DOS apps, etc.
Now, why would somebody use Novell now? Is it a REAL OS? Does it still need DOS/Windows to run? What am I gaining/losing by using Novell instead of a *NIX?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
I were Novell, I'd be more interested in developing a Samba-style SMB server NLM to try to replace NT file and print servers
Netware 6 already has this. I forget their name for it but, it goes under the guise of Any Client or some such. With this feature, Microsoft clients can connect to the Netware 6 servers without the previously required Novell client. The Netware 6 server looks to the client, like a NT server. Netware 6 also supports an NFS like export that allows *nix clients to also connect natively, without the use of Novell client software.
Netware 6 has a lot of really powerful features. What's more, I think that Linuxers would like it because it has a similar feel, even if the commands are different. Hell, it even runs Xwindows with the IceWM.
(* People have cried the Novell is dead/dying mantra since the release of NT 4.0 yet, their still plugging along. Don't count them dead yet. *)
Novell is the Apple of Networking. (Well, except for their esthetically ugly screens.)
Too many companies rely on them. Their cash cow may shrink, but will probably never die any more than 360-based mainframes will. At worse, another company will purchase them (IBM? Computer Associates? Some European tech company?)
If Wall Street hates Novell that much, then perhaps I'll purchase some stock...........wait, I have no money for stock purchases due to the last stock poppage and sour tech econ. Bummer.
Table-ized A.I.
For example, Win2K was released with 100,000 known bugs. Apache Software Foundation was running their website w/Apache 2.0 beta for over a year before the code went "gold". This is the fundamental difference. Just b/c Microsoft calls it SQL Server 2000 doesn't mean it's gold code.
Hey by the way, MacOS X 10.2 Server ships with MySQL too !
For years, Novell Netware included a copy of Oracle. Didn't Oracle recently announce that they aren't porting to Netware anymore? That's probably the only reason that Novell has moved to support MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Actually, let me make an educated guess here.
I think they've seen the writing in the wall as far as NetWare goes, and are thinking of taking the best parts of it and porting those parts to Linux. This story on E-Week shows that they've re-organised thier engineering units to make a "Cross Platform" group with Linux as a specific target. MySQL on NetWare may be the first step in a wholesale change at Novell.
If they can pulll this off, they'll survive - quit nicely too, I think. Dunno if I'd mortgage the house to buy thier stock, but they seem a survivor in the IT world.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Novell's single sign on may be their saving grace. Their OS business is on hot idle and has been for almost a half decade. They don't have much hope of being a large ecomerce/.net framework type player and their is no compelling reason for people who are not already Novell customers to take up the platform so where do they go from here? Maybe they have a future as a convenienve/IT streamlining application vendor but other than that I don't see where to company is headed and neither can the market.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yet if you look at their full product range they have products such as;
I could go on but the message is clear, the company is packed with good products which it doesn't know how to sell.
Last year I ran an evaluation of all the Meta Directory software out there and DirXML was the clear winner. We bought it and are very happy with it's performance, it certainly should be looked at by anyone who has looked at the Sun ONE or Siemens "equivelents".
My advice to Novell would be that they need to spin off the Netware business to continue developing this and keeping their many millions of existing users happy. The remainder of the business should then be refocused as a Directory Services company. They already almost give away eDirectory, they should make this more official and then when organisations are hooked sell them all the value add products which integrate so nicely with this.
This would also be welcomed by all the organisations who are concerned about Active Directory's single platform nature and the high cost of the Sun ONE Directory and their on|off support for Linux, which Novell have always been very committed too.
This is just a me-too tatic by Novell. Many of Novell's previous me-too's have fallen by the wayside as well. One exception at present is Perl.
NetWare ships with Perl 5.00307, an almost useless and stripped down old version (released October 1996 by the Perl folks, and released November 2000 by the NetWare folks) - where you cannot compile your own Modules without a Windows NT machine (95/98 will not be sufficent) Microsoft Visual C 4.2 or later, a CodeWarrior compiler and linker, the "NetWare SDK", "NLM & NetWare Libraries for C" and "NetWare Server Protocol Libraries for C".
To put it as breifly as possible; Perl for NetWare is poorly supported, and does not support basic things such as fork(), chown, syscall, chroot, alarm, and about 20 other functions that are standard with a real, and current Network Operating System (ie: Unix based systems, and to a lesser extent, Win32 systems).
MySQL users on NetWare will very likely fall into the same unsupported trap... History speaks for itself, beware!
There are some very good reasons to use Novell, and there are some very good reasons not to use it, but the availability of MySQL as a reason either way just seems odd.
There is (and has been for a while now) a MySQL NLM for Netware that is under the GPL (sorry, I can't find the URL at the moment) and I recall seeing a PostgreSQL NLM on a 4.11 server a while back as well. While I applaud Novell for adding MySQL as a part of there base package, as it adds some additional out-of-the-box functionality, I don't see this making a dent in there slow decline.
Now, Novell does have some VERY interesting tech, but they don't sell it well, they never have. Lets take GroupWise as an example. It could be an Outlook Killer. It has just about all of the features of Outlook (and Exchange), and in many a better product. However, they don't push it, and they don't encourage people to try new things with it. I would LOVE to see them take a really bold step and release a version of that in the same way Sun did Star Office (OK, like Sun but without all the associated problems...). OOo plus Groupwise plus an easy to use SQL database front end would be a real alternitive to M$. It would also shine a bright light on Novell for a long time, one that could then be used to help them grow again if they played their cards right.
I think that the info tech world, except for a few places, has largely written them off the same way that Banyan was written off. Wasn't Vines/Streetalk lightyears ahead of anything else at the time?
Novell may have a barely positive operational cash flow (sales revnue - sales cost), but I'd almost bet that they have an overall negative cashflow, especially considering their investment holdings are probably taking a pounding.
I seriously doubt that there will be a Netware 7.
*I* think they should have ported the Netware file/print system to other OSs. Clearly Netware-the-OS tanked when the Internet got hot and people wanted a general purpose OS to run arbitrary server apps (db, web, ftp, mail, etc etc) on. Netware as an OS failed miserably (we tried!) to do those 'other' tasks well, so people bought NT/Unix.
They they found that NT/Unix did file sharing "good enough" and stopped buying Netware. Pretty much end of story.
Novell also fucked over Mac users with NW5, which is why we're on 2k. As awful as it can be, its better than what Novell had at the time for Mac support.
Okay, we have 1.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Novell also offers a free email & directory service, MyRealBox, as a combination marketing and testing platform.
Novell Connection magazine is really an excellant rag. http://www.nwconnection.com/
It's short, which means you can find time to read the whole thing each month.
It has informative articles about Novell products, not lame marketing-written crap. It's worth keeping up on what Novell is doing because most of their products are truly kick-ass.
You can probably qualify for a free subscription.
The killer feature is the monthly column on packet filtering and traffic shaping. Awesome. Probably the best regular column out of the dozen or so IT/Networking mags I get each month.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
And if they're not 100% sure, why are they touting it? For the same reason that commercial companies release before it's time: mindshare.
Yes, we know that an open beta from Apache is as good or better than an initial release from a commercial developer. We know that the stable releases from Apache are akin to the third (or so) patch release for a commercial product.
What's the difference? Quality? Not necessarily. The difference is in semantics. Some open source entities produce bad code (have you looked around on Freshmeat lately?) and some commercial software houses produce good code.
How can we tell which is better? Cutting the crap and testing the products in question. If having the source available is important to you, obviously the open source software will win out every time. If only package functionality matters to you, waving a banner won't determine the best choice.
As far as "gold" code, you're wrong. "Gold" code simply means that it's going to be released. It designates that a particular snapshot of the codebase is being burned onto CDs and put into a shrinkwrapped package. "Gold" refers to a baseline, not the quality of the baseline. If you replaced "gold" with "good", I'd agree with you.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
One of the main problems Novell have is that the market, and customers to a large extent, always associate them with Netware, which most corporation are activly retiring.
It's fairly recently that you could run their products without at least one Netware server around. I think even eDirectory was like that initially.
If they had *started out* with platform-independant products that had full functionality without Netware, they'd be in good shape. Unfortunately their early strategy was very MS-like and appeared designed to sell Netware licenses.
Just to share blame, why not address the issue that a large portion of Perl modules that use native code aren't portable outside of UNIX (and even then...).
Ummm... Of course this is because NetWare itself doesn't have these functions. Current operating systems? UNIX is *how* old? NetWare by your metric IS the current operating system. As for network-wide security and administration, I'm sorry but Novell's offerings are superior and have been superior for years. NIS+? LDAP? Active Directory? Pshaw! NDS was already better than these years ago and eDirectory widens that margin.
Why does Novell need to update Perl? Because they bundle it? Why doesn't the Perl community maintain the port just like they do for every other operating system ? Or is Novell special on your shitlist? It's not like Novell controls the Perl source.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
In all seriousness: can someone please explain to me why this was modded down as as troll? I just do not get it.
Yet if you look at their full product range they have products such as...
They even owned WordPerfect for a while, too!
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Netware? Do those guys still exist??? And what on earth are they selling now? Gee, you don't say! A vaccum cleaner with MySQL installed? Wow!
free the mallocs!
moderators take note.
Thank you.
http://saveie6.com/
Thank you - doesn't clear it up too much, but thanks.
Any approximate time frame on when 4.0x series might be deemed 'stable'?
creation science book
I do like Novell's strategy towards OSS, porting their tools to Linux, NDS, etc. I've used NDS, Groupwise, NES on Netware, and now NDS on Linux but following is just FUD.
From the Infoworld article:
Novell will embed the commercial version of MySQL, enabling developers to build applications without requiring use of the restrictive General Public License agreement, as is required of the open-source version of MySQL.
Failing to state what exactly it is that Novell's license will allow that is restricted by the GPL. Anything short of Novell's decision to let everyone and anyone redistribute their software freely without any restrictions I don't see how this is possible. Especially if you read the next paragraph that reads:
Developers can, for example, build a Web site with a database providing dynamic content on NetWare, according to Mickos.
<sarcasm>
You're kidding me!!! Who should I praise for this innovation? Thanks to Novell, hundreds of thousands of websites will now be able to provide *dynamic content*!! Just think of the possibilities - online shopping, searching the web, personalized news; virtually no limits! Think of all this as opposed to the old-style, static-web, restrictive licensed GPL-ed software.
<sarcasm/>
C'mon now. Who are they fooling with these kinds of comments?
Maybe they should buy Amiga, and perhaps Palm will let them have Be cheap, and then all such software packages can be in the same place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well I have several Novell certifications and have decided,like so many others, not to maintain them anymore.
Everywhere I see sales people sell MS products even to Novell users. So it have been hard to keeping your hopes up.
In my last job, I started to shift my focus away from Novell, because I, like everybody else, can see that their customer base is getting smaller.
I like Novell and their products, they have not managed to convince me that I should keep my focusing my career on Novell. I fear that I would end up with at lot of skills for product that is not wanted.
The "fun" thing is that many techs are running away, so it is easy, where I live, to find a job if you are a skilled Novell tech. with Certifications. But who wants a job that focuses on a skill that might not be there in the future.
my sig
Talk about a corpse that refuses to die. Yikes, this is even worse than IBM's debacle about insisting on keeping OS/2 alive...
Novell needs to reinvent themselves seriously. (Shipping a database with the server does not count as reinventing seriously.)
That seems to explain why Microsoft was attacking MySQL so much a few weeks ago.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Why oh why they don't just support a real SQL DBMS?
As always people coding to MySQL will have to code around all sorts of limitations that wouldn't be there with real SQL DBMSs as Firebird, SAPdb or PostgreSQL.
Their code will be more complex, less reliable, their databases will get all sorts of inconsistent data due to lack, or underutilization, of integrity constraints and transaction control.
And once they go over three concurrent users, performance will suffer... then they will have to recode to ANSI SQL, because MySQL isn't standards-compliant at all, and will never achieve the level of elegance that SQL provides -- and that is already less than a truly, but not yet widely available, fully RDBMS could give.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
My understanding is that FLAIM has depricated BTRIEVE for low-level storage in Netware. FLAIM is used to store all the records in NDS, though technotes about Novell's license service make reference to a choice between FLAIM or BTRIEVE for that.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen