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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
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.
This is not really a big issue one way or the other for the GPL. MySQL is available with a GPL license, for use in GPL applications, or with a different license for non-GPL applications. Novell thought that some of their customers might want to build a non-GPL applications with MySQL and Netware, so they gave them that option by supplying the non-GPL license for MySQL. I mean, this makes sense; I would think that adding MySQL with the GPL license to Netware isn't much of a value add.
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.
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.
Novell has been around a long time and will continue to be around a long time regardless of what any Linux/NT/200 people may think.
The company I work for is a pure Novell shop. We run Groupwise for our email, and plenty of other Novell products and we do extremely well. In fact, Novell even powers our web presence. We will be upgrading from Netware 5 to Netware 6 this year.
It IS a real OS. Standalone server sits in my server room and runs all of it's apps very well. It's a hell of a lot more stable than any 2K/NT box and in many ways, just as stable as a Unix box. I won't say better, but I will say it does a good job.
I hate it when people say that Novell is dead and dying. They've been around a long time and they are still around because they always make a decent product and require very little maintenance, unlike the MS OSes out there.
No matter how fast computers get, you'll always be waiting - Matt Klem
(* 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.
Netware in its current incarnation is a top notch server OS. It's got one of, if not the best LDAP implementations available (NDS, eDirectory) that offers integration with all of its products for very easy administration. (Groupwise is an excellent Exchange replacement, minus the constant virus problems). Once its setup, that's it. It does not require constant attention like other server OSes *cough*. It does still load on top of DOS (for reasons I can't understand) but it is in no way a DOS based OS. In fact, it seems to have borrowed quite a bit from Unix in versions 5 and 6.
What you gain: dead easy file/print administration, extensible LDAP framework built right in, excellent reliablity/stability, can be easily (if you read the documentation) performance tuned
What you lose: application support and expensive licensing.
For small to mid size businesses, you could do better with a WinNT or *nix solution, but for large enterprises with massively distributed networks, Netware is an excellent way to go.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
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
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!
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.
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.
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.