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."

Comments

Let's hope their quality doesn't die

[groove10]

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?

Re:Let's hope their quality doesn't die

[segment]

4 years is not much in fact I know someone (no bs) who had an ircbot idle for four years. Reason why he didn't want to take the machine down was because he had an extremely old kernel and didn't want to go crazy with make mrproper *etc* etc* etc* only to find that his machine was a dinosaur. This was around Y2K mind you and from what I remember he finally took the machine down in first quarter 2001 because he was moving, and his colo was going the route of fscked*company. As for the dropping packets portion, that is somewhat impressive as a side note, however, what was the server's task, I mean think about it, if it was only getting lets say 1,000 connects per day (which is light) there should be no reason why it would drop packets.

Let's Hope this Attitude Lasts

[TheRedHorse]

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.

Interesting, I never knew this..

[TypoNAM]

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" :)

Re:Not a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget GroupWise, as Novell has stated that they will port it to Linux. It's a possible Exchange-killer.

thank god

[deviator]

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.

Will they "close" Evolution source?

[The Revolutionary]

"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?