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Novell Not Pushing Ximian Onto SuSE
dhunley writes "According to TechCentral, a recent story on Novell's plans following the acquisition of both SuSE and Ximian comments that 'SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own', according to John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region. 'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux'."
No point trying to merge by force. Novell understands you can't take two things, and make them come together by force. I figure that eventually Novell will have SUSE using Ximian, but it won't be immediate. They may have made some bad decisions in the past, but Novell has learned.
Well what do you expect? You really think Novell is ready to actually do anything? They are probably currently revamping the whole company, working hard on getting thier services completly linux integrated, and figuring out what the hell they still want and need to do.
Dont expect anything revolutionary from Novell in the middle term. In the long term, expect suse to disappear into novell completly and have a really tightly integrated set of OS+Services+GUI.
The problem is that it is hard for them to justify buying something when it is freely available.
I don't think that's necessarily true. I'm not saying it isn't true for most companies, I just think it's not true for all. Redhat has made a good run at it. The thing a purchaser has to look at is not the OS by itself, which one can get for free, but the features that the company adds on to it, such as Redhat's RPM service and the user-friendly Anaconda installation system, both of which are open, but are in limited use by other distros. (I believe Yellowdog, or whatever it's called, the Linux for Mac processors, is the only other distro to use Anaconda). That ease of installation alone made me pop out the $30 for the boxed version of RH 8.0 when I went hunting for my first Linux installation.
Other companies that incorporate Linux into their service offerings, such as IBM, use Linux as a baseline for their services, so that you're not paying for Linux, you're paying for IBM's services.
I would be led to think that Novell's main channel of pushing the SuSe product would be through Novell's own consulting business, where SuSe Linux would be a value-added service, not the main dish. So, in other words, you wouldn't be ordering Linux with a side of Novell, you'd be ordering Novell with a side of Linux.