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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.
- 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.
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