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YaST to Become Open Source
Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.
Hopefully we can get other large companies putting as much support into open source as Novell is.
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Chunky Bacon
I've been using Yast for the last few months. I've been really happy with it. Updates are a breeze. Installing new software couldn't be easier. It hasn't missed a dependency yet. Usability is pretty good and fairly intuitive.
Clearly Novell is taking the hint. They're aware of the fact that the world is going Open Source, and they're willing to deal with it. If they ensure a good relationship with the open source community now, they'll be rewarded with success for years to come. If they distance themselves from the open source community, like SCO, then they will make more money in the short term but be ousted in the long term.
Novell is a good organization that has been around since the beginning (or, at least, for a long time). I, for one, hope they continue to be around and keep up the good work.
Many distributions have open sourced their installers and administration tools, but for the most part, many have been useless for other distros. Many expect the EXACT filesystem hierchy of the original distro, exact package tools, etc. etc. So if I want to make a distribution and base it on someone else's installer or admin tools, I either have to dig into their source and do it myself, or make another distribution. There are some notable exceptions (webmin being one of them). While this is mostly good news, what I question is, will I be able to use it on linux from scratch without heavy porting? If not, it's not much use to many people.
Thing is, I think Novell's got the idea. Once we can develop good, solid, working ways to install the operating system, supporting it should be a lot easier. And Novell knows that there's no reason to NOT tap the millions of people online willing to help code this platform. I personally believe Novell's trying to secure itself as the second large Linux supporting company. By buying Ximian, they gave themselves a very viable desktop, by buying SuSE, they gave themselves a stable platform. Now they just need to do the middle work such as getting it to work on all hardware, and making it easy to support. And IMO, open source is a hell of a lot easier to support, especially since the people with the problems, usually know how to go about fixing them, and will send patches.
Don't discredit the selling power either. This probably won't hurt the sells of SuSE at all, in fact, it very well might augment sales, due to the people without fast internet connections wanting to get a taste of the YaST code. Don't count on it, but the potential's definitely there. Novell's making a good move here, I commend them.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
To add to the previous three posters who all made excelent points - RedHat GPL'd most everything and provided ISO's for download, and still managed to make money off of Red Hat Linux. This will just increase install base, not decrease sales.
No, not at all.
You need to realise that Novell's product is not a Linux distro - that was never their reasoning behind the purchase of SuSE. Rather Novell purchased SuSE to give them a strong, established Linux distro on which to base their directory service offering.
Prior to purchasing SuSE, Novell evaulated its position in the market. What they found was that while they had a kick-ass directory service product, they were being kicked in the pants when it came to new deployments - primarily by MS Windows and Active Directory.
Rather then attempt to re-build and re-position the NetWare brand among IT decision makers, Novell realised they could do much better by taking an existing base Operating System with widespread appeal, and integrating NDS with that.
Essentially Novell's cut NetWare* and tied its future to NDS on Linux.
Enter Linux. It had everything Novell needed: stability; maturity; widespread developer support; GPL (why write a new base when you can modify an existing one?); a wicked reputation among IT techs and, best of all, an increasingly bright future with the potential to topple all challengers.
Announcing NDS on Linux and then subsequently purchasing a well established Linux distro was, not to put to fine a point on it, absolute genious. NDS gets the best possible base, loss of market share to Active Directory is significantly slowed or halted (and eventually reversed if all goes to plan) and Novell regains the reputation it had among techs back in the days when MS' best offering was WfW.
GPLing YaST isn't a loss for Novell, it's a gain for Linux. Which makes it a gain for the base OS Novell will see increasing use of NDS on. Which makes it a win for Novell.
*Yes, Novell will continue to support and even offer NetWare-based NDS installations. But the fact remains that if all goes to plan, Novell will see its new business increasingly tied to NDS+Linux rather than the old bundle of NDS+NetWare
Janie took my gun...
I think a better rule would be not to make excuses for badly written tools.
GUI config tools should follow three simple rules:
Otherwise they are useless.
eh, I'm not gonna go into the desktop wars, saying why Novell did something one way or another, I'm not on the Board of Directors and I wouldn't know these things. But Ximian is doing a damned good job at making a desktop along with the rest of the GNOME and KDE world. By buying SuSE, they gave themselves a floor, walls, electricity, the basic framework of what they'd need if they want to move all their products to linux. By buying Ximian, they gave something to skin the house, make it look pretty, make people want to buy it. SuSE is a KDE distro, but there's no reason you couldn't install Ximian over it, and that's one reason they may have bought the two companies, to give themselves a more diverse enviroment to attack RedHat at their own game.
Could be another reason behind opensourcing YaST: give it a GTK2 interface and wala, you've got a complete, working corporate desktop platform, which of course, they can then use to sell their own eDirectory software, and others as well... It's all about building a platform. Microsoft understood this too, how do you think they became so powerful? They built two seperate houses, both very shady but they got the job done. Then they skinned one house when they realized it was about to collaspe. Moved the skin from the first, to the second, and poof, a solid platform. Now they can sell Active Directory, Office, and other software for it, and not look like bumbling rejects.
It's all about process, format, proceedure.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
The problem is SuSE and distros like it are NOT suited for you. You sound like someone who wants to do everything themself. Try slack, gentoo or arx, not SuSE. Use the CLI, it sounds like what you want and need. Or, as an alternative, a version of YaST that has various levels of interaction, like simple, moderate or expert.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
Remember the roots of Novell. They are a network administration company and this is what they want to do. By making a decent, freely(or cheaply) available linux distro more popular in the business and home world they are causing a threat to the MS monoculture model and will have an advantage with dealing with all the different types of systems out there. They'll be the ones calling the shots of the network, where all really happens.
When you get a new system, please learn how to use it. If something annoys you, find a way to switch it off, or change its behavior.
/etc/sysconfig files directly, you'll love how it streamlines things. That way you will have more time for other things.
/etc/modules.conf for instance, just to watch TV on my Linux box?
Actually, if you change a file directly SuSEconfig can tell that has happened and will not touch it in virtually every case that I did that. But, the best approach is to edit
Why do people insist things are great for newbs when it makes ones life easier, and makes it quicker to get to the point where you want to be. Why should I spend two hours setting up a TV card manually in
I don't think YaST's appeal comes from its installer aspects, but rather from its system management aspects after you get installed and running.
The registry?
.config file between the 2.4 & 2.6 kernel if necessary, it just ignores what it doesn't know.
1. It is way too complex. There is no way you can understand it all or hand edit it if required.
2. If it is corrupted, your whole OS won't even boot.
3. Its huge! 45MB of my fairly clean XP box.(although it is in a domain and has policies applied to it, etc, etc, but not much software)
4. You can't move the registry between machines, let alone between different versions of Windows. I can move my
Several smaller independent registiries might work better. e.g. one for linux conf, one for X, one for KDE, etc. So each one has a small well definied file for all configs.
Somehow you're supposed to know that
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE ->Autodesk ->
AutoCAD -> R14.0 -> ACAD-12:409 ->
Applications -> AecBase -> LOADCTRLS
is supposed to be set to 0x0000000d (13)
(as opposed to say 5)
I suggest you take that complaint up with Autodesk; MS can hardly be held responsible for how other companies store their apps' configuration settings, and the documentation they may or may not provide.
True, MS are just as bad in this respect, but surely you could have picked a better example? That's like saying that text config fles are bad, because of sendmail's one.
It's official. Most of you are morons.