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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)."
They have the announcment on their main page now.
UPS Sucks
this will have any effect on Ximian though... so I'm not too bothered ;)
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Does not sound to me like Miguel will be rolling in cash though ...
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
I am not hawking NOVL, and I do own less than 100 shares (disclosure complete, post commencing) but I'm glad I re-evaluated them. With their recent release of their products for Linux (which seem to be doing reasonably well), and now with this purchase, it seems that they are serious about Linux. Since they were always great in the directory space, it seems like they just might be positioning themselves to try and contend in directory services again.
libertarianswag.com
Novell acknowledge that the copyrights have been transferred to SCO (*sigh*).
Still, this looks like a Good Thing for the Novell product lineup, as well as for Open Source in general.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Ok, first: what does the mormon involvement mean? That they are all based on Utah, and mormons are common there.
With that out of the way:
Ray Noorda was founder of Novell, but not founder of Caldera (he just paid for it through Canopy)
I have to wonder if Novell is viewing the Gnome desktop as the base for an administrative desktop. Novell's GUI has been seriously lacking from what I have dealt with. With their recent decision to ship netware with a linux kernel, I think they are slowly moving their product lines to be enhanced linux servers.
it was going to get s/mime for 2.0 anyway.
notzed
Novell a few years ago used David Bowie's "Changes" in a television advertisement.
In case you missed it, Novell has been going OpenSource crazy the past year, and is actively embracing Apache and Linux.
NetWare 7.0 will actually be the core NetWare services, but abstracted in such a way that they will now ru on a Linux kernel OR the base NetWare kernel.
Novell is even making their techs get certified in Linux.
So it looks like it makes sense after all.
People forget that the purchase of WordPerfect included WPOffice, now known as GroupWise. This is the one WordPerfect technology they didn't sell off to Corel. It doesn't get the hype of Exchange and Notes, but frankly it's more versatile than Outlook and a lot easier to use than Notes. As far as administration, well, it's fine until you have to restore someone's mailbox!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
HP is not contributing GNOME anymore. They backed out some months ago. It was publically announced on all sort of places.
Evidently, the good reverend hasn't heard of Native File Access Protocol. It was released with NetWare v6 almost 2 years ago, and allows a NetWare server to appear as a Windoze (SMB) box to Windoze clients, a Mac (appletalk) server to Mac clients, and a UNIX (NFS) server to UNIX clients.
Check it out at www.novell.com
For reference, eDirectory already runs on Linux. Sun's DS has glibc issues on any recent linux distro, and openldap of course runs on Linux too.
-b
Novell aren't the highest profile company but it is apparent they are misunderstood even here on /.
They aren't "about NetWare" or "moving their product lines to be enhanced linux servers". Their position has been solutions for the past 8 years or so. They push the directory model and make peripheral products that use it. They are [almost] as happy for you to use eDirectory on Windows, Solaris, Linux or whatever as NetWare. Using Linux means they don't have to put resources into a kernel and commodity services and can focus on what they do - making a BETTER version of what everyone is doing.
Their GUI isn't really lacking - it's a basic XFree86 - it does the job. I am pretty much never at my console so I don't even load it. And Gnome as an admin desktop is unlikely to be what they want - again, NetWare admins rarely use the console - certinaly not for normal admin which is all currently a mix of the 5 year old Java ConsoleOne and increasingly Web based.
DR-DOS is NOT dead, it's just not main stream. I use it! Also Novell doesn't own it anymore Devicelogics does. Cheers!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Dont need to, because I was around.
Ray Noorda paid for it, Ransom Love worked on it.
To me, that means one was the founder, the other paid for it.
Hell, they did plenty of interviews at the time explaining how Noorda was just a financial backer, and had no operative control over the company.
Hate to burst your bubble, but:
a) Canopy owns a whooping 6.5% interest in Troll Tech.
b) Canopy owns no part of Novell, AFAIK. Novell was founded by Noorda, yes, but Noorda got bought off years ago.
Novell had another huge issue at the time. The had two different development camps. One wanted to move to TCP/IP and off the NetWare kernel, the other (Corporate) wanted to stay with NetWare. Corporate had most of the power at the time. So Novell at the time was sending out two different messages. Ray Noorda seemed to want to take the company to a Unix kernel for the server specifically Unixware. He also had a MAJOR battle going on with Microsoft at the time and probably focused too much attention to battling them as you mentioned above. However, if he would have stuck with his plan, NetWare would have probably have been migrated over to UnixWare AND most of todays apps for Linux would probably run just fine on it. In the worst case, it would be a heck of a lot easier to migrate from UnixWare to Linux than from NetWare to Linux. So Novell would have been in a much better position today than it is now....
I have been asking Novell to become another Linux distro for a long time now, and it appears that they are going to do that with NetWare 7. I look at it this way, I could get the following:
NDS management
GroupWise Email and Scheduling
Linux Apps
DirXML (Manage different directories)
Support
Linux Kernel and various apps
Hopefully I would get all that at a price competitive to RedHat Enterprice Server. Now it appears that they want to make their money with a per seat licence, so I hope that they start out with something like 1,000 seats for a LOW amount i.e. $800 per server. Personally I hope that they drop the per seat thing and go to some per processor licence. Either way Novell seems to mess up their licencing, so it will probably suck! They had better realize that they don't have many more chances left...
Lastly, I believe that this purchase will only be good for Ximian. I can see Novell putting effort in to hooking in their admin tools, and nothing more. Their technical guys seem to get it now and they seem a lot more focused on what their customers want.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
The only thing that's even remotely comparable is zsh.
-Dom
My bet is this is why they bought Ximian. The Ximian guys have the knowlege to write an Exchange replacement.
Can you spell groupwise?
Or Exchange replacement?
Uhhhh, guess you've never been to Provo and Novell's Headquarters, across the street from BYU. Heck you've probably never been to Utah, if you think the Mormons don't have a HUGE say in what happens there.
A HUGE MAJORITY of the company is Mormon, the company was formerly housed on the BYU Campus, many, many employees simply graduated and walked across the street to Novell, and they even used BYU for the Brainshare conferences until they outgrew the facility.
Having worked for Novell for several years, I can say, without a doubt, there is a tremendous Mormon influence on it's operation.
Hell, they used to call the Exec's and Board Members the Mormon Mafia.
But it doesn't really have any bearing on the Xiaman Purchase.
Novell's fault's lie with it's inablity to Market, not it's Mormon influence. If anything, they could take a lesson from the LDS and learn to get thier message across.
Isn't Exchange Connector just a screenscraper for Outlook Web Access?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If you think about it, Ximian's strategy with Mono is quite brilliant. As a developer I can't really see myself wanting to create a Gnome application using the GTK+ C APIs simply because I would really like to avoid using C for writing graphical applications. I'd much rather use something like Java or C#, which to me seem better suited for developing GUI applications. As more and more developers realize C and even C++ aren't really tailored to creating large maintainable GUI apps, then an alternative will become more popular. As much as I hate to say it, I believe .NET is going to become the most popular framework for developing client side apps. Not because the .NET GUI APIs are better than Swing, but because of the ubiqitous nature of Windows and the fact that the .NET CLR is seamlessly integrated into the Windows infrastructure. Sun must reach the same level of tight intergration with the JVM if it even hopes to compete on the client side as .NET builds up steam. It's sad to admit that the majority of applications programmers are in the Microsoft camp. This means they are familiar with Microsoft tools such as Visual Studio, so it only makes sense that these developers will adopt newer MS technologies like .NET. Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing to be able to develop an app on a superior platform like GNU/Linux and then be able to run that same app on Windows unmodified? Yes, we have this capability with Java, but as this community can surely understand, choice is not a bad thing.
:)
Build bridges people, not moats
LOL
In truth, Utah is not nearly as high a percentage of "Mormons" as you probably think.
Care to take a guess?
80% you think?
Try again.
How about 55%?
Yup, that's right. Only 55%? While this is higher than any other state, its hardly as strong as most people believe.
Furthermore, the whole idea that Mormons run Novell because it is based in Utah is hardly fair, but even if it were so, I think that the initial assertion on this thread is a little goofy--Novell, even if it were owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, would not put itself in such a precarious position buy forcing religious literature down any one's LAN. Sorry, just wouldn't happen.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
They've got approximately $600M in cash, if you say 5% is "not expected to have a material effect", then it could be up to $30M!!
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Novell isn't unusual in government offices. Not sure why you are suprised by that, since you once worked for one. Novell fit their needs a decade ago, and governments are slow to change to new technologies.
I live in the SF Bay Area (Unix central), and most of the city & county governments still run Novell at some level. I've spoken to a number of IT managers at bigger cities throughout the US in the last year, and they all talked about their Novell network.
It certainly is a problem trying to get it working, especially when trying to get it working alongside an hybrid NT/Un*x network. But moving to a different architecture can also be a big problem.
Cities are often several
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
No, not just Ximian Connector. Ximian Red Carpet the Linux Software distribution product when integrated with Novell ZENworks will certainly add value to ZENworks Application Distribution for Linux desktops.