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Novell Vice Chairman on Ximian, SCO
dotnothing writes "microsoft-watch.com has an interview with Chris Stone, who is the Vice Chairman of Novell. Stone says that Novell will be introducing a Linux distribution with Novell products and the Ximian desktop, but that they are not out to compete with Microsoft. He also expressed some gratitude to Red Hat for countersuing SCO."
Speaking of Red Hat -- SCO released some of their legal threats which I found to be entertaining. Excerpts are in this story...
I think they have considered allowing such a thing to happen.
.Net running on Linux, etc.
I seem to recall that Microsoft released over 1 million lines of code in their shared source effort to get
This may be a bit off topic, but I didn't want to submit a story and have two SCO headlines in a row. Darl's holding a teleconference today to answer questions about the Red Hat suit. The press release is here.
Call 1 (800) 238-9007 and enter 274040 as the access code.
You are right; the WinForms stuff, specifically are not only protected (AFAIK), they aren't even functional outside a Win32 environment (they more or less just wrap the Win32 api). Of course, that means a lot less than you may think. The portability is likely to be important mostly for server stuff, where you won't have an UI anyway. And as we've already been seeing, apps written under mono will tend to use GTK anyway.
.net is a standard, and the IP is offered royalty free. MS is unlikely to be able to change that. Beyond the core, it would be nice to keep compatibility wherever it makes sense to do so, but if MS makes a fuss, just dump the pieces they want to keep to themselves. Mono doesn't live or die on 100% compatibility the way Wine does, for example.
.net for server stuff will decide to use the mono equivalents instead (since they are feee to move over to the windows side). WIth enough mono deployments, MS may well find itself locked in from raising too much of a fuss. But again, the real benefit of mono doesn't lie there anyway.
I don't really think the promise of portability bewtween Win and Linux is the important part of mono. It is rather that the system is a pretty clean, well-designed one. Also, it _does_ offer excellent portability between Linux versions - run the same binary on whatever distro, on whatever hardware. Redhat on x86, Linux on an iPaq, Debian on a Sparcstation, RH on an IBM s390 - it will just work, without recompiling or installation issues.
The core of
In fact, given Linux' steadily increased prescence as a server, if MS goes off and makes mono incompatible with their own version (whether by API changes, implementation secrets or licensing stupidity), chances are developers who use
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I found this bit interesting:
Microsoft Watch: Now that you are buying Ximian, will Novell offer a Linux desktop distribution?
Stone: Yes. The plan is to package the Ximian desktop with some of our products. Specifics are yet to be determined. But we want to cover Linux from the desktop to the server.
Ten years ago, Novell was the owner of DR-DOS, Netware, and Unixware, and had the potential to be a solutions provider for everything from the desktop, to medium sized workgroups, to enterprise scale solutions, but what did they do? They tried to compete against Lotus Smartsuite and MS Office with an office suite based on Quattro Pro and WordPerfect.
NT wasn't even ready yet, they coulda been a contender...
Does linux have anything remotely resembling .Net? Other than mono, of course.
You mean, somthing like dotGNU?
Seems like all is well, for now anyway.
My photolog
My read is that Novell would rather control the client. In my view their Windows (& DOS) clients have always tried to "take over" the client machine and duke it out with Windows rather than peacefully coexist with it. That's my personal bias from years of Novell clients on Win boxen, though. (Windows is far from blame itself.)
That is a backwards reading of how things happened. When DOS and Windows were just desktop OSes, there was no other network client on the box for the NetWare client to "duke it out" with, so there was no conflict. When Microsoft decided to destroy Novell they began introducing dirty tricks into Windows to hamper the Novell client. One example is the NT GINA (the gizmo that asks for your login credentials on boot-up) which will only pass credentials on to the Microsoft networking client. In order for the Novell client to get a login, they had to replace the GINA. While this appears to be a "take over", it's actually their only choice if they want the client to work without asking the user to reenter their credentials (and then everyone would bitch about how clunky that was.) The Novell GINA is egalitarian in that it passes credentials on to all clients on the box. The "take over" line is FUD.
I just had an odd thought. You've seen the available Java GUI on the NetWare console, right? I wonder if they'll try to make that the Linux client desktop? . . . Nahhh, they aren't that crazy.
That would be kind of silly since they just bought Ximian. The Java GUI was just a quick-and-dirty implementation used to impress the PHBs. I don't know anyone who actually uses it unless they have to (like during the install). It's for people who say, "Man, that Ferrari is really nice...except it doesn't have an automatic transmission."
Ain't skeerd (of a command line)
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Oh, I'm not saying that wouldn't work. (I had a web-app that used LDAP from NDS for auth) But I want MORE than just a user/pass auth.
- I want home directories mounted
- I want local users autocreated
- I want contextless login
That's what I can think of off the top of my head. IMHO, doing a 'PERFECT' PAM module leads to NDS integration. For a good example of NDS integration, look at Pegasus Mail. Pegasus Mail can be installed once on a server, and using NDS API calls, can tell _who_ started it, and use the proper home directory for email.I want Linux applications (Evolution) to do that. ;) I want the desktop PC to be user-agnostic. Pegasus Mail provides that. The full Zen package provides that. I want that for Linux. (Actually, I want to provide that with LTSP - but application integration would make it even easier)
If you want to see what that French PAM module can do, go here You might have to check Google Cache - it appears to be down right now.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Quote from Steve Ballmer: Responding to questions about the opening-up of the .NET framework, Ballmer announced that there would certainly be a "Common Language Runtime Implementation" for Unix, but then explained that this development would be limited to a subset, which was "intended only for academic use". Ballmer rejected speculations about support for free .NET implementationens such as Mono: "We have invested so many millions in .NET, we have so many patents on .NET, which we want to cultivate."
You can find it here
And what about this: .Net patent could stifle standards effort
Patents will never be a problem for Mono? Not sure I believe that...
It was killed because Microsoft made it difficult for IBM to get hold of Windows 95 up until the release of that OS, and told IBM effectively that if they didn't stop marketing OS/2 and Smartsuite, offering it cheaply to other vendors and bundling it with their own PCs, they could kiss goodbye to distributing Windows 95 at anything close to a reasonable price.
This is all laid out in Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact. It also matches my memories of around 1995, when Warp was being heavily promoted in the UK, on TV ads, in every computer shop, bundled with PCs, etc, right up until the day Windows 95 came out, whereupon it practically disappeared.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.