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."

Comments

Is anybody else worried...

[wrinkledshirt]

Is anybody else worried that this might turn into another Corel?

If Novell's got problems keeping up in terms of IT relevence as it is with its own core product, it could be really nasty if some of that starts to rub off on Suse and Ximian.

I don't mean to troll. I just liked it better when all these things were separated. I'd rather unification through proper standards (eg: LSB compliance) than through pocketbooks.

The best decision that Novell could make

[micaiah]

About a year ago I was discussing with my friends this very scenario. It was a great decision on Novell's part, probably IMHO the only thing that could allow them to rebound back to the forefront. If they use Linux (open source) as their desktop rather than relying on Microsoft to be fair players they will be able to make a better product for the desktop.

I remember when people thought of networking they thought of Novell. I took a Win2k class not to long ago and the only people that knew about Netware was myself, one more person, and the instructor. Hopefully that will change with e-directory on the back end and Linux on the desktop. Although any company isn't 100% idealistic, Novell is far more open standard minded than Microsoft will ever be.

Thoughts

[sethadam1]

- If Novell bought Ximian just for Mono, they should open source the Exchange Connector.

- If Novell intends to still support KDE on SuSE, they should say so quickly.

- Novell should DEFINITELY keep the desktop distro free. This will be key in infiltration and getting techies involved and informed.

- Novell should rebrand everything "LinuxWare" in following their NetWare line.

- NDS on Linux should be a huge priority. A successful, non-piecemeal central authentication system for Linux would be fantastic (yes, I know about PAM + LDAP, etc)

- A Novell client for Linux (even for 5.x and 6.x) should get official support TODAY.

- They should learn from the past, and invest in the desktop. That's where they'll sell this to potential customers, as and end to end solution.

Re:Thoughts

[Nat Friedman]

Since Novell purchased us 3 months ago, we have increased our investment in all of our products, using Novell's resources. And we've been aggressive about driving open source and Linux throughout the company.

Here's a little evidence, all postdating the acquisition by Novell:

- My notes on our new desktop development center in Bangalore
- An article from the Times of India about our new developers there
- The freshly-published (today!) Mono Roadmap showing where we're going with the development platform
- The first entry in our new Evolution blog, describing the plans for Evolution 2.0, to be released early next year
- The announcement and wiki for the Brooklyn GNOME developer's summit we are sponsoring this month
- The announcement that our Exchange connector now supports Exchange 2003

And this is really just the beginning. As you can imagine, most of the super exciting stuff we are doing is behind the scenes.

From time to time since we were acquired three months ago I've heard people say things like "Novell bought Ximian just for XYZ," where XYZ has been either: Mono, our Exchange 2000 connector, GNOME, Evolution, Red Carpet, "the name," ...

I think it should be clear that this is ridiculous.

Yes, we will still support KDE on SuSE. However, we hope to use this opportunity to provide Linux developers and ISVs with a single stable platform for desktop application development.

Yes, we will keep the desktop distro free. We will even make things more free than they have been.

We're only just getting started. Stay tuned.

Re:The real motivation

[GerryGilmore]

To my mind, there can't be any doubt about it being related to Red Hat. Consider:

While the average user may not have known about RH's dropping of mainstream Linux (the "hobbyist" version in RH Marketing slides), those closer to the major players have known for many months that this was coming.

SuSE, not being dummies, must have spotted the tremendous opportunity that this would give them in the North American Linux market.

All SuSE has to do is to keep a mainstream version alive to keep the market fed for their higher-end versions - as RH *had* been doing, and they have the ability to clean RH's clock for them.

In case you haven't guessed, I consider RH's move to drop their mainstream versions to be a crucial blunder. But, it's their company......

what Nat forgot :)

[luge]

It's even better than what Nat says ;)

- for the first time ever, we've been able to open up our Ximian Desktop development process. You can get basically every patch we write on desktop built and applied to GNOME 2.4/2.5 via the xd-unstable channel.

- if you poke through gnome CVS, we've got skeletal code for a groupwise connector there. Again, something the old novell would never have done- release not only free code, but basically defacto API docs by way of code as well.

- up until the suse purchase this morning, we actually had a link to gnome.org on the front page of novell.com. Look around for a link to gnome.org on sun's site- it's not on the front page, and it's not in the Java Desktop main page, either.

So, like I said... it's even better than Nat says it is. :) Of course, I'd be lying if I told you that I can guarantee it'll be perfect going forward- but so far all the signs are very positive for that.