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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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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
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.
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......
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.
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.
... 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.