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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...
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...
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!