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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...
but that they are not out to compete with Microsoft
so, will they install Ximian on XP?
... information wants to be forwarded
"but that they are not out to compete with Microsoft"
"Uh... Yeah... We want to sell this but, uh.. not a lot of it..." - Chris Stone
Stone: We are going to continue to push it. .Net on Linux is a great idea. We just hope Microsoft isn't against the idea.
I'd 'just hope' Linux users aren't against the idea.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Don't buy out SCO, it is a bad investment.
To buy SCO you would need a reason why this is a good use of money, to make them go away is probaly not a good use of corporate funds.
Those millions could do a lot of legal fighting, or development, or even advertising. All with a better ROI then removing SCO.
They aren't going to destroy Evolution AND they're going to make it work with GroupWise. Ahh... for those of us running Novell/Linux in the academic world who are getting rather tired of Microsoft's mafia-esque licensing tactics (software assurance, anyone?), this is great news. One less major hurdle between now and a Linux desktop rollout. Yay Novell!
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.
It's a bad idea.
Remember OS/2? No? See? Nobody remembers OS/2 (Bill Gates quote!).
OS/2 ran Win3.1 apps natively, so nobody wrote OS/2 apps, but Win3.1 apps.
The lesson is that as soon as you support somebody else's standard, then nobody has any reason to use your standard.
Why don't you people get a clue first? No underlying Mono infrastructure is threatened by patents, since ECMA requires that all patents be licensed at no charge, and .Net is standardized with them. There are a few pieces which could potentially be patented, but their removal would not significantly harm Mono. If Microsoft still hasn't sued the Wine project, there's a very slim chance they could sue Mono.
Your other side of the argument is basically the "not invented here" thing. If Microsoft invented it, it must be bad for free software. It's not like Microsoft can force Mono to change its ways, so I fail to see your point. Mono is not a Wine clone, it's a development framework for Linux, one that could potentially be very useful for writing portable software.
I don't see anyone here bitching about Java, even though it's also a similar, proprietary technology controlled by one party -- Sun. Hell, I would say that Linux is more of a threat to Sun than Microsoft. So why isn't Java a threat to Linux?
This can only be a good thing. Despite what a lot of people say, Novell has lots of customers, and most are really commited to Novell products. Thus with them starting to move to Linux, and push it to their customers, we will see a lot of corporate Novell users switching to Linux. Novell has great tools for Windows, and if they port them to Linux (seems like they plan too), it will make convincing people to use Linux that much easier. PHB's still love to pay for software, let them pay for Novell Linux
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...
OS/2 ran Win3.1 apps natively, so nobody wrote OS/2 apps, but Win3.1 apps.
.Net? Other than mono, of course.
If OS/2 hadn't run Windows apps, nobody would have ever used it. The reason it died was the high price and poor hardware support (it didn't run on non-IBM machines without a lot of tweaking). Stop using that example, for fuck's sake.
The lesson is that as soon as you support somebody else's standard, then nobody has any reason to use your standard.
Does linux have anything remotely resembling
Chris Stone is an excellent guy for Novell to have as a VP, as well as being a well respected chair of the Open Group he also used to be base player for the band that became Aerosmith (he left 6 months before they had their first big hit).
However, I have to wonder about the wisdom of producing yet another Linux distribution, particularly one aimed at the desktop arena. Although you may not know it from the figures, many internaional companies have already standardised on SuSE or Red Hat for their Linux vendors and the name Novell still has some bad connertations in the Corporate world.
Much of Novells strategy today seems to be selling very high value (expensive) products based around XML and Web Services (see their Silverstream aquisition) to Fortune 500 / FTSE 100 companies. I know as an implemetor for their excellent DirXML Meta Directory in a 100,000 employee company.
To my mind they would be better forming an alliance of the sort that SuSE and Sun announced yeterday, where Sun support and Distribute SuSE Linux and SuSE use Sun's Java in all their distributions. Novell could add their tools to SuSE and Red Hat, such as Directory Clients and Xen Works clients, concentrate on selling their servers on the SuSE and Red Hat platforms they already support and bundle SuSE and RedHat desktops for Netware customers. This would give them client penetration and server sales opportunities without having to compete with the Linux vendors. They could also leverage the relationship these vendors have with Sun and IBM who would be happy as the Novell server components also run on Solaris and (I think) AIX. Thoughts?
As located here, RedHat calls SCO's practices "likely to cause confusion, mistake or to deceive". Is that legalese for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt"?
Just a thought,
Joe
Seems like all is well, for now anyway.
My photolog