Caldera/SCO Co-Founder Ransom Love Speaks

securitas writes "CNet has published an interview with Caldera (now SCO Group) co-founder Ransom Love, in which he talks about the Novell acquisition of SuSE, Novell's Linux history, the early history of Caldera, the SCO-IBM lawsuit, his new role at Progeny and open standards. It's a good read that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space."

Comments

Re:Decent

[NickFitz]

From the article:

Love left in 2002, before the company renamed itself SCO Group and launched a legal attack on IBM and the open-source operating system.

You'll have to try elsewhere to "hear from the troublemakers".

Re:WTF

[MoxCamel]

Owned linux ?, Last time I checked nobody owned , owns or never will own linux, not even linus. Isn't that open source is all about ?

You're reading it too literally. He means "owned," as in, owned the market space. Much like Red Hat currently "owns" the Enterprise Linux space.

Re:Long-standing issues ?

[vidarh]

It's no secret there's been longstanding issues - SCO weren't particularly happy when project Monterey was cancelled.

Re:Long-standing issues ?

[shystershep]

Must be legal reasons, I suppose.

Yep, it's called a statute of limitations. My copyright law is a little rusty -- so I don't know what limitations issues there might be as to the supposed infringement -- but for contracts and the like, the limitations period starts running when there's a breach. So if they'd argued over these "longstanding issues" for years, it might be too late to sue over them. But if they just discovered something, well that's a whole 'nother ballgame.

Re:"Ransom Love" is such a cool name.

[Anonymous Coward]

Englebert Humberdinck is a stage name.

The guys real name is Arnold George Dorsey.

softball interview

[SQLz]

not even worth the read.

Not Exactly the News

[ThisIsFred]

From the article (quote by Mr. Love):

"We were using Linux as a desktop at the same time. It was more stable than Windows NT at the time. And NT as a server was a joke.
But NetWare was so dominant they were almost killed by their own success. NetWare was so successful that they could never move on."

Yeah, NT was a "joke". Well, I guess that finally proves my theories about the arrogance of Novell in the face of a direct threat. I'd be wary of any business venture in which Mr. Love is involved. I'm also dubious with regard to a SuSE/Novell merger producing anything capable of competing with Windows.

I began using GNU/Linux around 1995. It was more reliable than Windows NT at the time, but nowhere near as fast to configure. It also didn't match NT feature-for-feature in filesharing and printsharing, which was the hotly contested marketspace for low-end server installations at the time.

Novell were content to sit on their fat behinds and make fun of NT, even as NT 4 hit the shelves, and PC sales for business went through the roof (giving Microsoft inroads through their OEM channels). Sure the first NT 4 installations crashed or exhibited strange behavior on a regular basis, but the Microsoft marketing machine was in full swing.

My personal experience was that customers demanded Windows NT 4 because it was "new" and less costly, no matter how I tried to convince them otherwise (I would be servicing it crissakes, not them). So, rather than lose an account, I did the work. Novell didn't seem to react to the threat.

Microsoft was competitive on pricing. The upfront costs for licenses were cheaper, MS made it easier to migrate by giving upgrade discounts and including client software to talk with Netware servers. Novell didn't lower its prices to compete, or make any gestures whatsoever to remind its existing customers that their present and future business was valuable (until much, much later, after they lost most of their customers to MS).

Microsoft purposely had lax per-seat license checking restrictions, which people found easier to deal with. Novell still stuck with their inflexible, floppy-disk based per-seat license enforcement, which was unpopular with techs and customers alike (oops, disk went bad, guess you have an expensive doorstop instead of a new server).

Microsoft made it easy to get documentation and programming tools for Windows. Microsoft sold those tools, other developers sold Windows programming tools, and there was healthy competition. Netware programming remained a black art, and there wasn't a whole lot of API to work with. Novell hasn't moved to correct this situation until very recently, and they still hassle you to give out information about yourself and your employer to see the documentation. I guess I'm out of the mainstream, because I think operating system developers that don't provide a full-featured compiler (even without an IDE) and reasonably detailed documentation for free are incredibly short-sighted.

Microsoft embraced (but extended) TCP/IP as the core communication protocol in Windows, while Netware had an ugly IP duct-tape fix up until version 5. Sure Novell's implementation of IPX/SPX was more secure (and probably performed better), but IP was more flexible, and IP-enabled software was practically falling from the sky, and it was not easily ported to Netware, (as evidenced by the fact that it wasn't).

Netware had a winning technology with NDS. I still think it's the most impressive piece of work that Novell ever released. Even with Microsoft dominating the fileserver marketspace, Novell still priced the NDS add-on for Windows more than the cost of a Windows server (with ADS) license.

***

Where do Novell's profits come from these days? They must have an awful lot of funds in reserve, because they are one of the slowest-moving tech companies I've ever seen. They still can't make up their mind about what to do, and Windows has steadily become better over the past decade. I've pretty much written off Novell. Does Netware even stack up to Windows 2000/2003 now? Does it scale as well? Does it's TCP/IP stack perform as well? Is it less expensive?

Re:Not Exactly the News

[dzimmerm]

Novell has some very large companies that use their netware. Right now I just ran a volume check on the servers where I work We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 Novell 4.11 servers and about 250 Novell 6.0 servers. We have about 80,000 folks that rely on these servers for doing business.

Yes, we have unix and microsoft servers as well. We have a lot more unix and ms servers than novell. Not because they are better, in my opinion, but because many of our lines of business are more familiar with MS products. The core file server and printing is done by novell because it is still the best server for that purpose.

I too, wonder if my novell experience will be worth much in the next few years. I have looked at dice and monster and you will not see much in the way of jobs for novell experienced admins and engineers.

Our company has the third largest novell server base and directory services tree in the world. GM is second and I imagine Novell is first.

I guess I answered pretty much where novell is still making their money, :) .

dzimmerm

Re:Facinating "if's"

[macrealist]

If only Atari hadn't fumbled the desktop

As a longtime user of Atari, they never fumbled the desktop. GEM was used by Atari as a cheap alternative/response to the MacOS. GEM had promise, but was declawed by an Apple suit. Although the suit didn't directly change Atari's version of GEM, it did stunt its growth (mostly over fear of a lawsuit from Apple). The value of the ST was the cheap price, easy API, and multitude of ports for such a low price. Very little time was spent on the desktop UI and OS, and it showed.

Remember, some of the must have applications for the ST made the desktop usuable and the OS faster - QuickST, Universal Item Selector, TurboST, G+Plus, MultiDesk, NeoDesk ...