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Novell To Cease NetWare Development?
Karl Cocknozzle writes "CNET News is reporting that Novell may discontinue NetWare following the purchase of Linux software company Ximian - for details on the purchase, see the recent Slashdot article. Novell plans to run its NetWare services - such as eDirectory and Secure Identity Management - on the Red Hat and SuSE Linux distributions."
Netware has been dead for some years now. THe advent of Linux has basically killed the use of Netware. The only place Netware is still installed is in already existing places, where, indeed it performs upto its reputation.
Remeber this story about the Novell server that was hidden in a walled off section of the University of North Carolina?
The found it after 4 years of it being missing, and still working perfectly, never dropping packets and doing it's job perfectly. Now that's what I call uptime!
I wonder if they will wall it back up after they put SuSE on it?
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
From the article:
"NetWare will continue to exist with a large customer base, and we will continue to maintain it as long as customers want it," said Chris Stone, vice chairman at Novell. Stone said he thought NetWare support would continue for the foreseeable future, even if development does not. "There are still people using (the) VMS (operating system) and minicomputers. Just because development stops, doesn't mean people stop using it."
It's nice to see a company that admits it will have to continue to support an old product and will continue to do so. However, it's yet to be seen how long this attitude will last.
But at least they have decided not to follow Microsoft's precedent for dumping all support for old products when new ones roll around.
Good news, at least for now.
My cousin, who works for Novell, said everyone at Novell was worried that the purchase spelled the end of Netware. The management held meetings to assure everyone that this was *not* the case.
I'm not sure we can know one way or the other. Companies can change their minds very quickly. Anyway, FWIW, that's the scoop I heard from an employee.
Back in the day, Netware was very nice. I remember using it at my first intern position in the windows 3.1 days. I guess the world has moved on. Its strange to think that many of the /. crowd has never seen it in action.
The moves indicate a major shift in strategy for Novell, which only a year ago positioned Linux as the enemy and didn't show up at LinuxWorld. Now company executives are saying open-source software is the future for the industry and their company.
:)
I guess Novell pulled a smart move of "Can't beat 'em, join 'em!" a year ago. Got to love the history points amoung articles making the view point a lot easier to understand. I "think"
This space is not for rent.
i have been trying to get my school district to look at linux for a variety of solutions. i get the same anti-linux crap. my district is a novell shop, from netware to gropwise, etc. i feel justified. almosty makes me want to send the idiots the articles. why the hell not. i teach history. they can't fsck with me.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
- Single Sign-On
- Integrated Distributed Peripheral Management
- Unified Administration Console from X11 and Win32 Clients
Novell brings all of this to the table, with enterprise support. Now you don't have to hack OpenLDAP, and sell it to the "Pointy-Hair" crowd.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Let's not forget GroupWise, as Novell has stated that they will port it to Linux. It's a possible Exchange-killer.
as a (former) huge Novell fan who still supports a few Netware clients (& runs netware at home), I say
THANK GOD.
I like the Novell kernel - but unfortunately programmers have gotten worse & don't want to take the time required to properly code drivers or modules for it. Everything runs at RING 0 - this means it's fast. It also means it's not a good market for developing software on it.
The Linux kernel has gotten Pretty Darned Good - with all of the modern features necessary in a state-of-the-art kernel. My complaint with it is that you can't scale Linux to multiple servers (from a management standpoint) like you can Netware.
Linux with Novell's style of enterprise management (eDirectory, cross-platform tools, open access to data, outstanding workstation management tools, etc.) would be a dream system to administer. It would also be innovative enough to handily compete with Microsoft's lack of enterprise management tools.
SuSE, however, DOES support IA-64, and they also support PowerPC. And since the Novell stuff will run on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, I would think this means they'd have to recompile it for at least the IA-64 architecture because SLES is for IA-32, IA-64, and x86-64.
If I remember reading right, Novell sold the rights to license Unix to SCO, recieving a certain amount of profits from SCO every year.
If this is right, I assume that Novell also retains ownership rights to Unix. I wonder how this story affects the SCO/Linux and now Redhat/SCO lawsuits, Redhat being one of distributions Novell choose.
Looks like they're also going to port GroupWise to Linux, so we'll have yet another new groupware, email, calendar thingie to play with.
I've been waiting for something like this. This renders all of our NetWare servers obsolete as we can run eDirectory and the likes on top of our favorite operating system. I really like to see a product list of what they gonna put out. I don't want to see a new distribution, just the rpm's m'am. This changes everything(!). They've already made some good moves about bundling NAMP (Lamp on NetWare) in NetWare 6.5 with loads of open source tools. The Enterprise is more open minded then it was just a year ago. Strategic, IMHO.
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
I suspect Novell is certainly up to something. Why? Novell wants to use linux as its default OS for the new netware product which will run on Linux.
But there's a snag. SCO is suing IBM, and possibly countersuing Red Hat. So what's a nervous Novell supposed to do?
Sue SCO. This will probably come at a shock to more than a few of you. But remember when SCO announced that it had ownership to the copyright to UNIX and didn't really transfer the copyrright to SCO?
First there was This statement. Then came the retraction.
In this article Chris Stone says:
The funny thing is that upon reading the retraction carefully, Novell never said SCO was right. It was carefully worded. It said, that the documents "appeared" to be valid. If you read it one way, it agrees with SCO. If you read it another it doesn't.
Interesting, No?
"Novell also announced on Tuesday that it would be porting its entire GroupWise collaboration software, a product that significantly overlaps with Ximian's Evolution client, to Linux. The applications handle e-mail, scheduling and contact information to keep employees organized. Although Novell intends to support both software packages, the eventual goal is to have only one, said Stone."
Evolution is presently distributed under the GPL, so of course Evolution in its present state can not be "closed".
But, as far as I can tell, Novell Groupwise is not open source. Is this correct? I admit that I do not have any experience with their products.
What I am worried about is that the above quote is meant to suggest that the technologies in Evolution will be integrated with Novell's own proprietary solution, and that future development of Evolution as an open source product will be called into question, or will be seriously slowed.
Are these fears justified, or am I missing something here?
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Misbehaving NLMs can still lock up the console in NW6. Even if I spawn a new one it frequently is useless, too. I expect using Linux as the kernel will greatly improve that situation.
On the one hand I think it would make a lot of sense to replace the console, but I'm thinking they don't want to leave their NetWare admins in the dark; that might tempt the Linux-savvy ones to just use Linux instead of Linux-backed NetWare and tempt the non-Linux savvy ones to stay on their current version rather than continue to pay for new versions and new feature support.
I'm fairly sure Novell doesn't want NetWare to be Yet Another Linux Distro. That just wouldn't make business sense. They're probably looking at Apple OS X and thinking along the same lines: put their proprietary apps & modules on top of an OSS Unix base.
I expect them to offer client software that will run on 'normal' Linux distros, though, or perhaps even distribute a whole Linux NetWare client with OS, apps and all. But I think the server itself will look and feel like NetWare for a while longer, but hopefully with better robustness from the console screens.
Forking to another subject, I'm also wondering about future platforms. I'm not so sure that PowerPC won't become the dominant low-end server architechture in the next 10 years, and these moves by Novell would let them easily migrate if needed. I don't really have anything to back that up; it's just a feeling that IBM can make that happen. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part because PPC seems like a much cooler arch. (Think virtualization.)
My wife had took over the technology at a school that was still based on netware. It had been years since I had seen the stuff, but I was drafted anyway. After spending a couple of years on it, I cheered when the school system dropped it. While the server is fairly stable it offers no compelling value to justify it's cost. Additionally, the resources to maintain it are specialized and expensive. Again, this is unjustifiable. Everything that Novell offered is built into every major OS (they only used directory, file, and print services). In terms of stability, there had to be a specialized guy out there every few weeks to fix the thing.
I think this is a great move by novell. From what I have seen, Netware as an OS only detracts from their bottom line. It forces them to port everything to their proprietary platform. Adopting linux as the underlying OS makes the platform more flexible and adds value to their services.