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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."
Well it is great that Novell has embraced linux big time but whether it is late or not is yet to be seen. Recent SCO drama does not seem to have affected Novell's plans, which is good since it shows positive signs that they are not too concerned about SCO lawsuits. One thing Novell should do is to make sure that they continue devlopment on Mono. Why? because this may encourage more developers to work on it which means more application for Unix/Linux. Remember that Windows is not the reason people still use it but it is because of the application which run on it .It also makes the life of the developer easy since maintaining two versions of source code is huge headache.
In all fairness I doubt they could've whipped this buyout together that quickly. There must've been months of negotiations.
The RedHat thing might've played into the timing of the announcement, but I'm sure they would've done it either way.
Technically (well, OK, from a marketing perspective more than anything), the only platforms NDS ever ran on were NetWare, Windows, and Solaris.
eDirectory is the current directory product; Linux support was added around the release of eDirectory 8.5 if memory serves.
There's also (at least) DirXML, NetMail, and soon the NetWare Services for Linux (currently in open beta).
And then there's the whole training thing - the Certified Linux Engineer program has been in the works for some time (heck, it was announced at BrainShare 2003 in April).
I think it's safe to say that Novell is "betting the farm" on its Linux future. All the signs are there - so if they don't do a good job pulling it all together, the company won't survive this. I seriously doubt this will be another WordPerfect-type acquisition.
You haven't used much netware have you ?
Novell servers have a rep for rock solid stability. They have been bricked into walls and run for years. I can't think of any working server that compares with netware for uptime, and when it comes to security take a look at the NSA ratings where novell stands.
What Novell is known for is reliability. Their directory services work a hell of alot better than Microsofts. This counts for alot in most corporate environments.
Simply put Novell linux has alot more corporate credibility than any other name except maybe (IBM or Microsoft) linux. This is a tremendous push forward for Linux in general. Especially when you consider they want the desktop and redhat just doesn't seem to care anymore.
Netware is a great & stable network operating system but difficult for developers compared to Windows. So Novell can hook into the Open Source community and get access to the largest base of developers
With Novell's global support & partners they can provide a very nice alternative.
A eDirectory enabled distributed network of Netware X servers (SUSE) with Desktop X workstations (Ximian) all kept up to date with ZenWorks X (Red Carpet) would be a nice solution for a lot of companies.
ps I'm trademarking those product names! ;-)
Cheers
VikingBrad
No that'll piss people off.
The reason people get pissed off by AOL is because a) AOL is crap, and b) they've already received at least a dozen AOL CD's (and they figured out AOL was crap back at CD #1.)
Most people don't even understand what Linux is. I helped one person with her computer and she kept calling the thing Windows, as in "I checked to see if the keyboard was connected to Windows and it was." The apartment where I live makes available to its tenants a computer station and the manager gets pissed off at all the work he has to do to keep the thing working... he asks me what he can do about it and I tell him to make people boot from a Live CD running Linux and he looks at me as if I were speaking Swahili.
Boot his computer from a CD -- without changing a thing on his existing installation -- and he understands immediately. Explain how a million people can use that CD and he'll never have to worry about thirteen-year-olds planting viruses or sweet-little-old-ladies who decide to save each and every single picture from Sears' website to the desktop and he gets it, immediately.
Just put the word "Games" on the CD, and you'll have half of America running Linux tomorrow.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
... but it occurs to me that many of you youngsters may never have worked with Novell products at all.
If they have preserved their technical culture through the last eight or ten years, then Novell is likely to be a very, very good fit with Linux. Netware was always clumsy and arcane to administer, at least at first; the learning curve was steep. (sound familiar?) But once you understood it, you could see WHY they had done it the way they did, and their solutions were often brilliant. In exchange for up-front learning curve, you got power under the hood. (sound familiar?)
Windows was all sexy and nice-looking, and it was a lot easier to administer up front, but it didn't have anywhere NEAR the depth of thought behind it. As of NT 4.0, Microsoft's first real competition to Netware, things like print services were a joke. You could share a printer, sure, but what if you wanted to share a pool of printers? What if you wanted an automatic fallback to a backup printer that wasn't ordinarily in the pool? What if you wanted to share the same printer across several print queues? Even several print POOLS? With Novell, any of these things were easily possible, though they did take some time to get set up. (arcane, remember?) Things like this were just flat not possible on NT 4. I'm not sure they're doable even NOW, to be honest. And Microsoft introduced Active Directory, to great fanfare, with Windows 2000; Novell had Novell Directory Services something like FIVE YEARS BEFORE. It seemed to me that NDS was, as usual, better thought out and more powerful, but when I was looking at AD, my NDS experience was several years out of date, so that could be mistaken. (I never got much past beginner-level with either directory service, FWIW.)
At any rate, the buzz in the NT 4.0 timeframe was all about "application services". This was shorthand for "you can write and run your own server software", which was very difficult to do on Netware. Netware was an EXTREMELY closed architecture. If they have retained that mindset, that's going to be the biggest likely sticking point. Windows was more open and cheaper, so it prospered, just as Linux is completely open and cheaper still. Novell may have a hard time with this issue.
At any rate, Netware servers were nearly uncrashable. It could happen: I had one customer who could crash his server just by running a particular application. But by and large, you could literally install Netware on a PC, put it in the closet, and forget about it for five years. Or longer. It would just run and run and run and always work and never break. I'm DEAD SERIOUS when I say "five years uptime"; Novell reliability made even Linux look kind of amateurish. You could pretty much expect that once you turned off the monitor and left the room, that the server would continue to run until the hardware broke. It was that good.
Assuming they've preserved their technical culture , Novell probably knows more about reliability than any other living x86 software company. And they had this directory services stuff figured out six or eight years ago. They've had a lot of time to think about that problem. I've also heard good things about ZenWorks, though I haven't touched it myself.
This could be very good indeed. I'm seriously thinking about downloading SuSE now; I know it's not going to change over the short term, but if the marriage comes off (and, mind you, MOST tech company takeovers fail), LinuxWorks could become the de facto standard within a few years.
No, this is aimed at more the Enterprise, rather than consumer based software...Corel Linux was before its time and as others have mentioned Microsoft.
LSB is very likely to continue as SuSE was one of the first adopters of it, but LSB will not bring in more sales staff or profit. I may try calling Novell or emailing them about the LSB as I am sure Novell could push this more strongly.
IBM gave $50m, to me this is just a nod of approval to the deal.
Really no comparison to this and Corel.
StarTux