Slashdot Mirror
Novell Buys Ximian
Quite a number of people have been submitting the news that Ximian has been purchased by Novell. All I've found so far is the press release linked to above; more links as they come in. Looks like Nat & Miguel will be remaining around, and Novell's continuing to expand its Open Source commitments. Update: 08/04 17:30 GMT by S : viewstyle writes "According to an interview with Ximian's CTO Miguel de Icaza at Eweek.com, Ximian won't be affected at all by Novell's buyout, and will be shipping a PowerPC version of Mono (preview release in Sept)."
An promising up-and-comer bought out by a wrinkled old has-been. Oh the humanity. What's their plan?
Tying together two sinking ships does not make one that's seatworthy.
Let's recap some of Novell's previous purchases:
Wordperfect - barely breathing
Quattro Pro - dead
Paradox - dead
DR-DOS - dead?
Novell, a company whose mission for the past 15 years seems to have been "Buy Microsoft's competition and run it into the ground" has purchased one of the few Linux desktops that could potentially give Microsoft a run for its money.
Might as well cede the desktop to Microsoft.
Novell's takeover of Ximian is likely to be as useful to Ximian's products - as AOL's takeover was to Netscape's products.
Watch out for total disintegration of Evolution in about a year's time. Can't say I'm too sad tho' Evolution took ages to load, was pretty unstable, and bloated as well.
Goog riddance to good rubbish then...
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
How much does Bill pay these days to spread MS FUD, Troll?
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
That's what happens with Opensource. A single person works his ass off on creating software in his free time. Ximian takes the software and sells it. Now Ximian got sold and the winner and person who earns the cash is Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman. Instead knocking on the shoulders of the single person who worked day in day out to fix the software the entire community now nock on the shoulders of these two who contributed nothing.
Doing nothing, getting all.
Ximian isn't dying technology. Ximian is stillborn technology.
They took an existing desktop environment, then changed it. They preached open source, then sold a closed binary plugin for their open-sourced mail client.
Stillborn. This is something Novel won't kill.
Not to sound overly discriminatory, but the Germans stopped believing in uber alles some time ago. The Mormons' version is written into the Book of Mormon and is alive and well. If there is a Mormon factor, I wouldn't be so quick to discount it as irrelevant.
actually (and interestingly enough) the company is currently run by Jack Messman (formerly the ceo of Cambridge technology partners) who is not a Mormon and lives in Boston. Day to day operation at the provo campus is however run by mormons.
this sig is deprecated
Of course not! That's because the nazis do!
<sarcasm>
Becasue obviously they've been really successful at doing that...
</sarcasm>
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
You can't compare mormons to Catholics. Mormonism is much more prevalent in its members' lives...controlling the lives in fact. I lived in UT for several years and mormonism pervades everything, affecting even non-mormons' lives. The upside was that when I went skiing on Sunday the slopes were relatively free.
:)
Mormonism is just one step from scientology on the "whacked" scale. How people don't see it's a made up religion I don't know...
In any case, go shop for your favorite Novell employee here or here
I include mutation. Expecting that to add structure is like expecting to be able to add structure to Lego with an assult rifle.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing