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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."
All they need is to revoke SCO's UNIX license and all of Linux companies become Novell's property automatically.
They acted like it was no big deal, but...
(from article) "Yes, it was admitted there might be some marketing opportunities caused by Red Hat's recent "end of life" declaration for some of its products."
My guess is that this has more to do with the decision to buy than they are admitting to.
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.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
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.
What happened to the standard "Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN" disclaimer that normally appears at the end of items that reference Newsforge articles?
- 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.
Can anyone explain to me how Novell make money? The last time I saw a Netware deployment was 1999 IIRC. I guess I am answering my own question, in as much as they just bought a Linux distro (and good luck making money with THAT! ;) ), but in the press release they mention that they are a billion dollar company; what are the shareholders valueing here?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
What happened to BSD?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
They should also resurrect SuSE's previous efforts in supporting the Power architecture, which more and more appears to be what will be competing with AMD64 (or vice versa.)
And not only should they keep the desktop distro free, they should create a Live Distro on CD and print up a few hundred million of them and make sure that everybody and their cat has a copy, a la AOL.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The Corp IT public doesn't trust you all that much, and you've already got a lot of explaining to do.
... die. They let their flagship directory services get overly complex and .. die. They bought several other companies that they also kind of let .. die. So Novell is respected, but not trusted. What Novell product would you roll out today? I can't think of one.
Novell is regarded by Corporate IT as a pretty confused (although formerly mighty) company. But definitely regarded as one who let their flagship server platform kind of
Now two years ago a sudden interest in becoming part of the Linux movement, "enabling" people.
I am sorry to see that SuSE did not try for the American market on their own - I think they could have made it - they have great engineering and commitment - everyone knows their support of KDE but does everyone here know that between 1995-1997 they supported XFree creation of video drivers with lots of time and money - when this process was in its infancy - I'm talking about the days here when you had to have one of 5 or 6 specific cards to run X decently?
I am guessing that SuSE thinks Novell can help them into the American market because of their contacts and longevity. I think SuSE could have done better - I don't get it - they are already working with IBM on s390 platform!!
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.
There are still a lot of Novell users out there, especially among certain groups (education, government, healthcare, law offices). I recently attended a CNA class, and all of the attendees fell into one of those catagories.
Novell actually has some pretty cool products out there, such as iFolder (syncs data between computers and a server), NetStorage (lets you access network drives from any computer with a web browser), and iPrint (lets users install their own printers via a web browser). They might not have a lot of new users, but they have a lot of old users who have no plans on changing - and they are coming out with some products that are actually pretty good.
Plus it's nice that our GroupWise email system resists most of those fun Outlook-based viruses.
I have blog like everyone else
I wonder if this is just the beginning of corporate owned and backed linux distros. Perhaps all major companies will soon want to have their own official linux distro. Novel Gets SuSE, Microsoft Gets SCO(um), Apple has to be all Apple-ish and get a Unix distro, and to top it all off, THE linux company, Redhat, shoots self in foot, outsources healing of foot to opensource community...
Strange and interesting days for the OS industry.
Just a thought, but now that Novell is offically in the game as a linux Vendor, won't people be scrambling over themselves for their certification products.
<p>
I know I considered getting Novell certified a few years ago, even tho I knew netware was dying, I sorta figured it was the best option available which would build on my Linux skills. Now Novell has an investmment in building Linux certification, I think this will be a major money pull for the company. It also benefit's the community as finally we get somthing which already is recognised (yes i know RHC and LCP) but novell is already embeeded in the heads of many an IT manager and is sought after.
<p>
Just a thought.
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here
One of the nicest things about the NetWare file system was the built-in undelete functionality. When a file was deleted, it wasn't overwritten immediately, and you could use SALVAGE to get it back.
If you had a lot of spare disk space, you could still SALVAGE files weeks or months later.
All I want for Xmas is for the Novell filesystem guys to sit down with Linus or Reiser or somebody and shoehorn this into Linux.
Yes RedHat has really dropped Free Linux.
Fedora is not just a change of name, it comes with no company-backed guarantees whatsoever (just community support), it's just a showcase and a beta distribution to get the enterprise packages tested in the community. Before the free RH had a small, but sufficient guarantee of support. Fedora doesn't even have the name.
For tech-savvy individuals it does not matter too much although they might fear the constant upgrade treadmill and the potential unstability, but these guys are a minority. For the real tech-savvy individual there is no shortage of choice and Fedora is just one of them anyway.
For not-super-rich corporations and institutions such as colleges, it is a disaster. They cannot afford the unfriendly per-seat licensing scheme of the RH enterprise products (even the cheaper ones), they loathe the EULA (it makes them auditable), and they've just lost the PHB-friendly support from RH.
Note this: it does not matter that Fedora provides updates of the highest quality. The PHBs will see this as an amateurish effort at best, easily hijacked at worst and will simply forbid this to run in their enterprise. Note that you cannot buy a small number of RHEL licenses and install it everywhere, the licensing agreement forbids it.
In other words this is the end of RedHat everywhere. People will be better off running stable Debian or *BSD because they have a track record of reliability whereas Fedora has nothing.
Soon the Enterprise solutions will follow them in the dump because no one will bother learning RH anymore. Current RHCEs are pissed off and will be angry at RH for devaluating their effort.
There is a high degree of probability that RH is throwing the baby with the bathwater and will be finding itself in the same league as the proprietary Unix vendors such as BSDI and SCO.
Myself I plan to evaluate Fedora when it come out, at home, but I won't touch my work RH9 installations until shortly before EOL. Then I'll probably move to something else, SUSE being a strong candidate, unless I am proved wrong with Fedora.
Fedora has a *very* short time to prove itself worthy.
It's even better than what Nat says ;)
:) 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.
- 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.
IAAL,BIANLY
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.
This is a natural counter movement to the deeply flawed and virus-infested Microsoft monoculture. Free association, not forced assimilation, is what cooperative and self-reliant people desire. And in the end, our operating systems, and the computers they run on, are community-building tools par excellence.
So we're all just building a better neighborhood, and trying to help all our relatives "leave the plantation" as it were. It's a big job and it won't be finished in our lifetimes.
There's a fundamental bit of truth expressed by all the Star Wars and Star Trek imagery used so often here. Liberty and freedom of choice in all good things are precious, worth working and fighting for. Hard and long.
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
... 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.
Agree wholeheartedly with the comment you made about reliability as I have first hand experience of that sort of uptime in a past life.
;)
The thing that let Novell down was the quality of third party software running as part of Netware "NLM" Netware loadable modules.
Interbase 4.0 (or was it 3.0) could reliably ABEND (terminate with extreme prejudice for all you youngsters) just by sending "prepare" twice on the same query using Delphi 1. Took me 4 tries before I realised that was the cause... We did get our development server within a week though
Also I once spent a highly productive TWO DAYS sitting around watching two CNEs trying to install Oracle 7.2 on Netware 4.1. Arcane doesn't begin to describe the pain those guys went through. I finally got to do my DBA stuff at 16:30 on day 2 - it took me less than an hour...
Happy days...
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Mr. Messman, Novell's boss, is completely financially motivated. His longlasting background in Oil made him, in the eyes of a 14% stakeholder in Cambridge Technology Partners (CATP) an excellent new CEO for the company. Cambridge now longer exists but is now part of Novell. My big beef with mr. Messman is that his management style of Cambridge was similar to the management style of a large oil company. Which is to say: Strict cost control on a heavily asset based company. But assets are not the same as technology, inventions and this kind of IP related business does not compare with the OS services that SuSe provides.
My question is: "What makes a beancounter from the oil industry a good fit for an international IT services company?" especially if you take into account his trackrecord with Cambridge Technology Partners?
maybe the American lunar expedition did not leave Hollywood at all.
Novell now has some solid pieces in place:
My guess is a consulting firm or two are up next to handle support and enhancements.
Novell will then have every piece in place it needs to pimp-slap Microsoft from the small business market: reputation, technology, and experience.
I'm also expecting to see some partnerships between Novell, IBM, and Sun to ensure that Mainframe, Power, and SPARC processors get tier 1 status alongside AMD64, x86, and Itanium.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.