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IBM Invests $50M in Novell, May Ship SUSE Linux
dave writes "Novell announced that it has finalized a $50 million investment from IBM, and that IBM can now begin shipping SUSE Linux on all IBM server platforms. Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,' and one has to wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come."
HP and Novell are putting SUSE on it's desktops and laptops.
> Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,'
This would explain why we have been running SuSE on our mainframes for the last two years then.
IBM has had marketing agreements with Red Hat, SuSE and and TurboLinux for quite some time. It may favour Red Hat in the States, but it seems quite agnostic about which distribution to recommend to customers.
You must have been out of the IT world for quite a while. IBM sells:
- intel servers (running linux or windows)
- AMD opteron servers (SUSE has an AMD64 port)
- power processor boxes (running AIX and linux)
A press release from 2000: SuSE delivers Enterprise Linux for IBM RS/6000
They are THE major player in the very large server market, however they are still a formitable competitor in the medium-sized to Pentium-class server market.
And for good reason. IBM packages their servers with a LOT of goodies. IBM Director (formerly known as Tivoli) comes free with every server. And now we're getting SuSE.
This isn't the first time IBM gives SUSE a hand.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
IBM has been far from a "Red Hat shop" in the past. SuSE has had -- until the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 -- better mainframe support, and SuSE's Enterprise distros for the Power architecture (pSeries & iSeries) has also been better.
/. anyway; why clutter a good post up with verifiable facts). IBM has also had a relationship with Red Hat (Hardware Management Consoles for the partitionable pSeries boxes use a customized RH distro), so it's not like they've been *only* SuSE.
You've been able to get SuSE Enterprise for Power with your pSeries box for a while now (sorry, no time to look up specifics, and this is
Remember, at one time, in the not-to-distant past, IBM was a "partner" with 4 different Linux distributors: Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and (gasp) Caldera. So, you might as well say IBM's been a "SCO shop" for a while, too.....
Out of the IT World? More like off of the planet!
IBM is the #3 server vendor in the world behind HP and Dell. They have about 15% market share. IBM has been investing billions into Linux and the types of servers that would support it best (notably blade servers -- perfect for grids).
In December 2000 IBM committed to invest $1Billion in Linux software, hardware, services, the open source community and partnerships during 2001. That's only 2001! If anything, they have only increase their rate of investment.
Add to all of this their strong commitment to WebSphere and Java, and you have a company that has more than embraced Linux. When IBM invested 2.5 Billion in a new semiconductor manufacturing facility,they automated the facility using Linux.
Come back to our world where Big Blue is bigger & bluer than ever!
If IBM can bundle a no-cost distribution, why should they pay even token fees to Redhat to bundle their version of Linux as the IBM-blessed version?
Nice reasoning, but SuSE isn't a no-cost distribution.
Remember that the first industrial-strenght implementation of a Linux system on the mainframe has been a joint effor by SySE and IBM.
The s390 source tree in the linux kernel was developed at the IBM Research Lab at Boeblingen (Germany) around 1999.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Harbinger of things to come is the latest phrase from the department of redundancy department.
A harbinger describes things to come, so this phrase is equal to "A fortelling of things to come of things to come". Not only that, but Merriam-Webster (my online dictionary of choice, since dictionary.com implemented annoying popups and banners that give people siezures) lists 2b (n. one that foreshadows what is to come) as a precursor to the modern definition (one that pioneers or initiates a major change). Not that "an initiator of major change to come" makes much more sense, as "initiator of major change" already implies something is to come.
~Will
sig?
It is now (look for old news about open-sourcing yast)
I think that Suse was the distro they pitched in Munich (although I'm not as sure about this one)
... computer maker IBM and Linux seller SuSE helped Munich evaluate the move and are candidates, the companies said.
Yes, they were:
From here
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Been there, done that and believe me, asking a woman if she wanted to come to your place to see your 3 foot inflatible penguin will _not_ get you laid.
Reliability. They are also faster than x86, especially in read/write to the HDD. Stripped arrays are fast.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Interestingly, from SuSe's FAQ:
Will there be a PPC edition of SUSE Linux 9.0?
Answer: no.
Although Suse once had a PPC port, it is clearly stagnant; this investment from IBM very likely means that it'll be revived, but that'll take a least some doing. Yellow Dog Linux remains the best choice to run Linux on your Mac, apparently, even the one with an IBM processor.
--
$tar -xvf
NOVELL has decided to go with KDE as desktop rather than GNOME.
Read more here. This is a direct quote from Novells Chris Stone.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=6115
Yes it does exist, and has existed for quite some time.
Yes it is based on code from another popular distribution in the wild.
I have it and have used the last 3 releases. Latest release is still in beta but they basically have taken the "unnamed distro" and layered on IBM software and customizations.
Latest version is beautiful, and lightyears ahead of the last release that is about 1yr old by now.
Customizations such as on first-time boot, it will detect your windows partitions, search out you Bookmarks, My Documents, and Lotus Notes ids and migrate them over to your linux install.
very slick...new customized splash screens desktops, openoffice templates, etc.
and yes i said Lotus Notes 6.5 running under linux with a customized version of wine. (based on opensource code from codeweavers i believe)..
Just taking a sec to put rumours to rest, no screenshots, as its an internal product under development and we all tend to like to keep out little secrets to ourselves. Sorry.
But yes Blue Linux is alive and well.
www.bluelinux.org : no route to host
bluelinux.sf.net: Rebellious fingers owned u
Red Hat will very likely lose it's #1 spot as far as sales in the commercial linux distro market(if they are even still #1). First, Red Hat hasn't exactly been friendly to the Linux community. They write kernel patches all the time for Red Hat and don't submit them to kernel.org That doesn't seem like very friendly community behavior to me.
#2) Their support contracts are outrageous. I've talked with people who work at various Universites and from what they've told me, Red Hat wouldn't give them any sort of discount as far support. The contract was so expensive there was no way they could buy it. Novell is the support contract and certification kings. Which brings me to point
#3) RHCE is worthless. OTOH, Novell is recommending LPIC alongside their own linux cert. LPIC attempts to be distribution neutral (except for package managers). RHCE is strictly Red Hat.
Novell is attempting to make Suse more open (with recent moves of open sourcing Yast and a lot of Novell software), while Red Hat is going the other direction. Red Hat has historically used a lot of software still considered beta and has been the buggiest linux distro out there.
It's Red Hat's own fault really. They have done very little in the past few years to keep customers. While Novell is doing A LOT for the community. They are going to not only snatch up Windows/Netware converts, but disgruntled Red Hat supports as well.
A big part of why you're seeing articles about Novell/IBM now relates to the new Linux for POS offering from IBM/Suse (article here and IBM website here).
IBM and Suse, as it's been noted repeatedly, have been partners for some time. SUSE has a much deeper market penetration in Europe than Red Hat, something we don't notice here in the states as easily.
Keep in mind IBM is not a distributor of linux, just a proponent.
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
Robert Love works for Ximian. I just finished reading his blog; his 'Project Utopia' was still stuck in my brain.
Is this rock and roll, or a form of state control?
We wanted to license SuSE for a 16 processor machine. A commercial license for SuSE was $4000 (4x 4proc $1000 license), EDU license was much cheaper, $400. It took 2 weeks to PO a SuSE vendor who supported EDU pricing.
After installing the system with SuSE and running their update utility, the new kernel installed by the utility doesn't boot, even after contacting SuSE enterprise support, they had no answer, except to boot the old vulnerable kernel.
RedHat EL was $50, and we downloaded ISO's the same day we paid.
We arn't running SuSE anymore.
historically IBM has always been a Red Hat shop
Nonsense. IBM has always, when they've shipped Linux, shipped RedHat on some platforms (mostly x86-based, started to move to POWER) and SUSE on others (S/390 and zSeries, maybe some x86. SUSE used to have a PPC distro too).
I can imagine that one reason for this policy is that IBM learned with Microsoft the danger of handing an OS business to just one company.
-- Alastair
For a few years now SuSE Linux has only supported their Personal and Professional level products for around 2 years. It wasn't actually two years initially but they would provide support for the last 4 releases of SuSE Linux. Since they did releases about every 6 months it worked out to be about 2 years worth of support for a given version. If you want longer term support you need to go with an Enterprise version of SuSE or Red Hat as that provides something like 5 years of support.
Wow ... I usually don't take advantage of the +1 karma bonus, but I will this time even if it is modded offtopic later.
:)
Someone tell me how the parent to this comment is a Troll?
I have no problem with Overrated moderation (since I'm usually not the one that caused the rating to be high) and I happily live with offtopic moderation but I never intentionally post Trolls or Flamebait.
Therefore I would like to see a cogent argument about how that was a troll when it is factual and directly related to the thread it was posted in.
Otherwise, dear moderator, you need a clue
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.