Novell's Chris Stone at the MySQL Users Conference

An anonymous reader writes "According to the MySQL User's Conference page, Chris Stone of Novell, the guy behind Open Source at Novell who was responsible for the purchase of SUSE and Ximian, will be speaking at the MySQL conference. Perhaps we finally get to see what Novell is planning to do with Linux?" (That conference is taking place in mid-April, in Orlando.)

Comments

Still waters

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

run deep. Can't wait to what Novell does after they've gathered all of this knowledge and all of these developers to their helm.
Maybe offer an Open Source replacement for Active Directory?

Re:Still waters

[cbreaker]

"The real problem with AD is it is a horrible crossbread between a directory and their old domain system"

Not only that, but the fact that AD is filled with nonsense.. much like the Windows Registry. Why couldn't they have made something that was more refined, slick, and easier to manage? They had every opportunity and they blew it big time.

Oh well, that's Microsoft for ya.

Interesting

[SisyphusShrugged]

By making these moves they seem to be positioning themselves to be in a similar position to IBM, at least as someone at the forefront of Linux development and usage.

This is an intelligent move as it allows them to move into an area (one of the few in the computing industry) not yet monopolised by Micro$oft!

Am I the only one who trusts Novell?

[oldosadmin]

I don't know about you, but Novell is probably the only company I'd trust with this large a slice of the linux pie. They got royally screwed over by Microsoft (market share wise), and I'm sure more than one exec up there has thought about dethroning Gates.

Plus, they bought one of the best implementations of Gnome and a great KDE implementation. I can see Novell bringing the linux desktop together in many ways.

Anyone wanna bet we'll be seeing a Knome 4.0 release rather than a Gnome 4.0 and KDE 4.0?

Re:Am I the only one who trusts Novell?

[Erratio]

I don't see dethroning Gates as a motive which would inspire one to stick to the open source mentality. Collectively among the Linux, etc. community it's a good goal, but if that were a driving force behind a company then there would be definitely interest in maintaining an amount of power which conflicts with the communal aspect. The main motivation has to be something more along the lines of wanting the best software and realizing (or thinking) that open source is the way for that.

Novell may be a good company for this because it seems as though they have a lot more to gain than their likely perceived losses, considering their current small foundation in these industries.

its win win win

[buddha42]

Novel really has so much potential here and so much to offer I really can't wait for them to get moving.

How about a cross platform groupwise based mail/groupware platform that can honestly compete with exchange?

Or a active directory competitor based on NDS.

Or a well respected certificate program.

Best of all, a genuine compeitor to redhat, forcing some price and service competition.

Between Novel, RedHat, and IBM the next few years are going to be amazing for linux. It would be nice if Sun would stop pussyfooting around, but they've got some issues to work out first.

Welcome to FOSS Novell!

[rjamestaylor]

But if Chris Stone says anything about "Monetizing Linux" or Open Source, please stand up and walk out. That's what should have happened to Darl Gates, er, McBride when he said he was going to turn Caldera/SCOGrope into "bottled water" sellers.

Novell is a Good Guy right now but Can'O'Pee and SCOGrope come from Novell...albeit an earlier incarnation with Noorda.

Companies, especially publicly traded ones, have loyalties to stockholders and are subject to spot-on 180's in pursuit of increasing stockholder value.

So, no offense, Novell and Chris, but I think you understand why we might be liking to keep things platonic right now.

Keep it up, Novell. You're winning many new friends.

Revenue will be their biggest challenge

[Twid]

For Novell, I think the biggest challenge is to keep revenue stable while customers transition from NetWare to Linux, without losing too many customers to Windows in the process.

NetWare is still pretty expensive on the server. A 50-user copy is about $150 a seat on CDW retail ($7,500), about $50 a seat under a licensing agreement ($2,500).

SuSE is $999 per server with no client licenses fees.

Figuring NetWare to be about 50% of Novell's one billion in revenue, that means Novell would stand to lose more that 25% of their total revenue assuming everyone switched to SuSE. Novell might make this up with SuSE/Ximian desktop revenue, but I see large amounts of revenue from Linux on the desktop as being a long time in the making.

The estimates for SuSE revenue for 2003 were for about $40 million in revenue. As near as I can tell Ximan never really made any money to speak of.

So, if I haven't bored anyone to death yet, Novell NetWare is a $500 million revenue stream, SuSE is a $40 million revenue stream. Novell needs to very carefully transition from NetWare to SuSE if they want to keep revenue even. They can also grow by taking customers from Microsoft or Red Hat. But, it appears to me that Novell will have to shrink about 25% in size in order to remain profitable in the short term. Red Hat, with a more mature Linux strategy, only made $100 million in the last four quarters.

None of this is a bad thing, and I wish Novell the best of luck. I used to work there, and I still have friends there. Just doing the math though it seems like they will need to get smaller before they get bigger again.

IBM open sourced AFS

[mdfst13]

IBM open sourced AFS, so there is some precedent. Of course, AFS's reliance on root servers (to integrate the different AFS cells; what allows cmu.edu to cd into mit.edu or pitt.edu) make it a stronger commercial open source candidate (i.e. potential revenue is more from leasing root server access than selling client or normal server licenses anyway). Still, anything that centralizes file serving can lead to support contracts, etc. that can justify open source development.

Open sourcing would also allow integration of open source tools like MySQL or ReiserFS.

SWAG: Maybe Novell wants to buy MySQL?

[PB8]

It's a very wild guess, but think about it. Novell already has the Ximian desktop and now SuSE. Next, try to get a key piece of the LAMP server , and what's more central to most current web content packages than MySQL?