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

[ahillen]

Novell purchased Suse, who still keeps Yast nice and proprietary.

1. YAST might be proprietary, but it comes with the source and you can share it as long as you don't charge for it (and you can modify it and share the modifications)... I just say that because many people seem to think that YAST is a traditional closed-source only-available-for-money-from-SuSE type of application.

2. SuSE keeps a somewhat stricter control (which boils down to: only SuSE is allowed to SELL it, others can only distribute it free of charge) on their setup program for their distribution, since this is the part the are able to differentiate from the other distributions. Apart from that they contribute a lot to different open source projects (Linux kernel, Xfree,KDE...), so calling them a proprietary company is a bit... strange.

3. I think the reason for Novell buying SuSE is more based on opportunities (what company is available to buy) and the technical merit of SuSE. I don't think an evil, proprietary company bought a like-minded other (which seems to be the spin you want to give it).

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!

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.

What about Brainshare in March?

[Admiral1973]

I think Chris Stone is more likely to reveal new strategies for Novell and Linux at the first keynote speech at Brainshare 2004. I'm sure he'll have similar things to say at the MySQL conference, but I hope that those of us who attend Brainshare get the scoop first. I'm looking forward to attending the conference again (I first went in 2002); Chris Stone was the featured speaker at the first keynote then, and he was entertaining and informative. Something about being a former drummer for Aerosmith seems to help him with crowds.

NDS/eDirectory on Linux

[mrscott]

Novell doesn't need to create an open source directory since there are already plenty of directories that work well wtih Linux - including Novell's own eDirectory which is the successor to NDS. eDirectory is now OS-agnostic and doesn't even need NetWare to run. It's one of the reasons that GroupWise (also soon to be available natively under Linux) runs so well in Windows-only environments.

Now... if we're looking for a *free* directory from Novell under Linux, don't hold your breath. eDirectory is an excellent product (beats AD in almost all areas, in my opinion) for which Novell should be paid.

However, do take a look at Novell's site. At one point, they were offering something like 250,000 free eDirectory seats - the OS didn't matter.

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.