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Putting Novell's SuSE Purchase In Perspective
An anonymous reader writes "
The editors over at NewsForge.com have combined their efforts to put today's big news about Novell's purchase of SUSE in perspective: what the news means in business terms and to the Linux community, today and in the future. A good read that includes quotes from industry insiders, IRC inhabitants, and NewsForge.com readers."
Another reader writes "This is a good analysis piece about how Linux has become Novell's lifeline, especially since NetWare's been dying...and post-Ximian."
Novell
The company that is responsible for much of Microsofts power. None too many can remember the early nineties when Microsoft Office was not the lock-in it is today. In those days, WordPerfect was THE wordprocessor.
Along comes Novell, replaces the marketing staff, and flushes that leadership down the toilet.
This is the same company that flushed their unquestionable dominance in the server market, too.
Too be honest, I am more concerned with Novell being an anchor to drag SuSE to the bottom with them.
I question the future of Linux with SuSE's aquisition, Red Hat's abandonment of the home user (reallistically), and the shaky ground of Mandrake.
You're trolling, but I'll bite. Novell is sitting on a mountain of cash and short term investments, making them a 1 billion dollar company. If their revenue stopped coming TODAY, they would be able to fully operate for at least 3 years. And I just did a NetWare 6 deployment a few months ago, and it is rock solid.
Government Contracts.
Well, eDirectory (NDS) is their flagship product, and is the best X.500 directory on the market. Next is ZENworks, the best desktop management solution according to Gartner Group. And they can both run on at least Linux, Windows, and especially on NetWare. I wouldn't say ignorant, just misinformed or uniformed. Now you can say you are informed. :)
Novell will continue to support KDE on SuSE, distribute its packages and maintain this offering which is a prime choice of people.
We will also integrate Ximian Desktop into their offering, because it is a more fine-tuned desktop than the default Gnome one, and leverages all the enterprise features we added to it.
NDS is part of the Linux Software Services stack that was announced for Linux earlier in the year. So do not worry about that.
Miguel.
Only available by FTP and not redistributable does not count as Free in any opensource book that I've read.
I think you've been misreading your books. The GPL (under which most of SuSE is licensed and which is pretty hot on ensuring distribution) certainly doesn't specify what protocol stuff should be available through - ftp only is fine. They do ask you not to redistribute the CDs or ISOs, but that's okay - they're within their rights to limit redistribution of YaST, which is on the CD, and all the Free stuff is available via ftp and redistributable. There are plenty of SuSE rpms being redistributed on rpmfind, etc. and there is nothing SuSE can do to prevent you redistributing rpms of Free software even if packaged to fit a SuSE distribution.
There's nothing to prevent SuSE making money from Free software and (with the exception of YaST which you can replace with yum or apt) that's what they do.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
The distinction between the two products is very important, however; I've no reason to doubt you know the difference between the two - but in the interests of informing the uninformed, let me jump in and provide some background.
I'll preface my comments by saying that I do work for Novell as a member of the Training Services organization; specifically, I develop and present public courses on eDirectory and the underlying technology. Prior to training on the technology, I worked in the trenches with both NDS and eDirectory, starting with the initial release of the technology in 1993.
NDS was based on a database engine that was specific to NetWare (called "Record Manager", or RECMAN). The RECMAN engine had difficulty scaling to millions of objects per partition, something needed for identity management for external-facing directories. Additionally, RECMAN was tied to the Transaction Tracking System in NetWare, making it very difficult to port to other platforms.
The database engine used in eDirectory is much, much more scalable and portable; improvements were added to the replication engine as well to ensure large replica rings could converge in a reasonable time without running into communications scalability issues. Also, in the most recent releases (8.7 and 8.7.1) of eDirectory, the handling of referential integrity in the database has been modified to be more scalable, much in the same way as the replication engine was enhanced in NDS8 and eDirectory 8.5.
From an end-user perspective, there's not a lot of difference between NDS and eDirectory - they both represent X.500 directories; rights are applied almost exactly the same in the two (the "Inheritable" capabilities in eDirectory were actually introduced in NDS8, the last "true" release under the "NDS" branding, though it used the more scalable FLAIM database engine).
But from a back-end architecture, the differences between NDS and eDirectory are as dramatic as the differences between the NetWare 2.x/3.x bindery and NDS.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Red Hat made public its end of life plans at the end of last year. Slashdot's big hoopla the other day was a leeetle delayed. See the original announcement. Anyone paying even a slight bit of attention shouldn't have been surprised -- there was even relatively-widespread analysis in the geek press.
Novell could be half a year behind and still have time for "months of negotiations". And it's a big company, so it's not suprising for something like this to take that long.
-- Vojtech Pavlik, SUSE Labs