Novell as Open Source Hero?

ccnull writes "Who's the #2 Linux vendor in the world? Would you believe Novell? Infoworld takes a look at this long-struggling giant and how it has (and hasn't) reinvented itself as an open source company in the face of utterly losing the LAN market to Microsoft." The piece argues: "But even though it seems to be holding all the right cards, Novell faces tough odds. In recent years, tough competition from Microsoft and dwindling support from third-party developers have caused Novell's once-loyal base to look elsewhere for infrastructure needs. Unless it can win back the loyalty of the industry, Novell's new, Linux-centric message could fall on deaf ears."

Comments

Mono

[Burb]

It's an interesting point of view expressed in the article. But although it mentions Miguel de Icaza, there's no mention of Mono. Not that there necessarily has to be a mention of Mono, of course, but it struck me as a strange omission. I'm very interested in the mono project and I got the impression that it was regarded as quite significant to Novell alongside the other Linux-type offerings.

Re:Mono

[JPriest]

They just need to package portage with SuSE Linux. rpm is horrible, gentoo's install method is time consuming, why not take the best of both worlds?

Does portage not scale?

Re:Mono

[bruthasj]

google for apt, yum, ximian's red carpet, and suse's yast.

Re:Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not RPM that's the problm, it's YAST. Almost gave up on SuSE until someone pointed me to the apt for Suse project.

There's a nice Case study of upgrading from Suse 8.2 -> 9.0 using APT. Didn't quite work as cleanly as a major Debian upgrade, but sure as hell beats re-installing the whold OS (as redhat and suse's yast installer seem to enjoy)

Re:Mono

[quigonn]

Isn't portage the stuff where the source is downloaded and then compiled? Sorry, but this is way too time-consuming. Why spend significant amounts of time for compiling when your Linux distributor can do that for you. And no, "optimized" compilations (like many Gentoo people do them) usually don't have any measurable performance improvements.

Re:Mono

[k98sven]

Well, Miguel helped create Gnome and Midnight Commander too, didn't see them mentioned either..

Seriously though, I don't think Mono is that important, yet. The main reason, I believe, for buying Ximian was their Desktop and Connector products, whereas the Mono part was a strategic investment.

Re:Mono

[Bert64]

Some apps benefit greatly from optimization, some don't, try john the ripper.. compiling with mmx support yields a 3x speed increase on any modern x86 cpu... It's also possible to optimize for a smaller binary size...
But by far the best part of compiling has to be dependencies...
Many programs have optional features which are only turned on if certain libraries are present, for instance kerberos support in pine and some other packages... If you use a precompiled distribution then all these packages will be compiled against all the optional components so they suit the widest possible audience of users...
However, that means we have to waste diskspace and ram on these unnecessary libraries... I use pine and pico on a regular basis, but i have never needed or wanted kerberos support...
And lots of apps come with optional X11/kde/gnome/gtk interfaces... its pretty irritating that some tool you want to run in commandline mode on a headless server requires you to install X11 and gnome etc..

Re:Mono

[sp0rk173]

It's a different way to do it. Please, extract your head from your ass. Options are usually not a bad thing.

Re:Mono

[killjoe]

"However, that means we have to waste diskspace and ram on these unnecessary libraries..."

The answer to this is loadable modules. For example when you install PHP on debian you get just the base php module. If you want to install any of the other modules for php (GD, XML etc) you simply apt-get the loadable module and restart php.

Re:Mono

[Bert64]

But this is often not the case, many programs are not written this way and you still need the stubs for these features even if you dont use them, you also need the module loading code and this all makes each program far more complex.

Re:Mono

[killjoe]

Most succesful open source projects do have a plug in architecture. Apache, php, jabber, gimp, eclipse etc all have this. It's quite common actually. In fact for the popular projects it's the norm and not the exception.

BTW module loading code really is not that complex.

Re:Mono

[Bert64]

And many of those programs can also be built without the module support, i have a static build of apache for instance, and i'm sure it uses less ram than a modular version with the same features loaded as modules.
Flexibility is good, being forced to use modules is bad..

Effective?

[deutschemonte]

Something about Novell's push to be a Linux/OSS company has not been effective.

Evidence? When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first? When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

They really need to get to the point where people instantly think "Linux company" instead of "failed network company" when they hear the Novell name.

Re:Effective?

[dorward]

When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first? When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

They really need to get to the point where people instantly think "Linux company" instead of "failed network company" when they hear the Novell name.

Give it time. Red Hat has

• Been doing Linux a lot longer
• Has never been anything but a Linux company

Besides - some of their brands do get people instantly thinking "Linux company".

Re:Effective?

[welshwaterloo]

This change of mindshare is never going to happen overnight though.. Things are still changing apace at Novell - changing all their desktops to Linux, making the next generation of Netware (and *alllll* their other software available on Linux.)

I wish them all the best.

Re:Effective?

[ron_ivi]

When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first?
When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

But which company is worth more?

Surprisingly, they're both about exactly the same. 2.71Billion for Novell and 2.76 Billion for Red Hat according to Yahoo Finance today.

Not that market-cap means a lot, but it was surprising to me. I suspect it surprises both groups - open source fans will be surprised to see the "failed network company" be worth so much - especially considering Red Hat was once worth 10X as much. And I suspect old-school-corporate types would be surprized to see a bunch of Linux hippies being worth as much as a giant like Novell.

Re:Effective?

[NaDrew]

They really need to get to the point where people instantly think "Linux company" instead of "failed network company" when they hear the Novell name.

Perhaps Novell should pull a Network Associates or NationsBank move and change their name to SUSE (NetAss bought McAfee, changed combined company's name [recently] to McAfee because nobody knew what "Network Associates" was; NationsBank bought Bank of America, similar aftermath). If Novell wants to be taken seriously as a Linux company, taking the name of their main acquisition would be a good start.

Re:Effective?

[stripyd]

When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

that "failed network company" who still pulled in over a billion dollars in revenue last year, and whose massive deployments now look like having an upgrade path to GNU/Linux? :-)

What do we think of when we say "SuSE"?

I'm sure there's many people who are happy they haven't started branding "Novell Enterprise Linux". "Entwicklung" is such a great word...

Re:Effective?

[PabloJones]

When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

The crappy Novell Netware client stuff they used on the computers back in high school.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Novell should...change their name to SUSE

NOT!
Compare Novell's brand image with Open Source's brand image

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first?
Hippies.

When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?
Big Business.

Re:Effective?

[AVee]

Evidence? When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first?

Linux company, one in a dozen, happens to be the biggest.

When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

Technically superior, way underappreciated.

At least, thats what I think.
I feel Novell is technically better than RedHat. The application support and the customers just aren't there. Anyone who has used Novell seriously will agree that there is no equivalent to GroupWise, ZENWorks or eDirectory on the Linux platform and there are only lower quality alternatives for the windows platform. Bringing this to Linux could make Linux it a serious option for larger companies...

Re:Effective?

[dosius]

They'd be repeating what Crapdera/SCOrdure did.

Moll.

Re:Effective?

[Albanach]

Evidence? When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first? When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

Eh? what does this have to do with the price of cheese? Novell Inc has been around since 1979 - Linus was still running around in shorts then.

Most folk probably think of Novell as a rather large company specialising in networking software - that's exactly what they are. They like linux because it's an alternative to Microsoft, and over in the Microsoft world there's a bigger company trying to sell copycat versions of many of Novell's programs. In the linux world there's a lot of demand for enterprise grade networking and groupware software.

When you think of IBM, does Jo Bloggs think of a Linux company? I wouldn't expect so - they too like linux because it fits in with their core products and strategies.

Novell are a major Linux company now because they own SuSE and Ximian. Now they are Linux companies, they just happen to be subsidiaries of Novell Inc.

Re:Effective?

[NaDrew]

They'd be repeating what Crapdera/SCOrdure did.

Good point, but one gang of idiots doesn't invalidate the idea. Making the better-regarded name the public face of the company--or at least the Linux arm of the company--could only help at this point.

For me, I'll likely be giving SUSE 9.1 a try within the next couple of weeks, and it doesn't matter one whit that it's actually "Novell-SUSE" or whatever.

Re:Effective?

[hdparm]

Although this would seem outrageously radical move, it could actually work better than a long known brand name which became a symbol of failure. They were pretty agressive with aquisitions in open source world, why not just apply that on the marketing level?

I wish them well. More strong Linux/OSS companies can only be good for overall computing experience.

Re:Effective?

[Errtu76]

Actually, when i think about Novell, i think about Ximian (and especially Evolution) and how that piece of software can become much better/bigger/worth more. I'm looking forward to the 2.0 release, which features (from the site):

* integrated connectivity to Novell GroupWise
* integrated connectivity to Microsoft Exchange
* improved offline support for IMAP accounts
* numerous calendar improvements,
* support for S/MIME, enhanced contact management
* Gaim instant messaging integration
* Improved desktop integration

Especially the integration with MS Exchange is somewhat unique for a linux application. If Novell can provide a linux-based desktop that integrates perfectly with a MS Windows environment, then they are a step ahead of RH&Co and are close to becoming (at least my) Open Source Hero.

Re:Effective?

[penguin king]

Well I have to say when I hear Novell I think Linux company. Many other people probably will now to that it's hit /. Only reason I know is that over here in NZ they came to our LUG meeting and gave us a big talk about what they were doing and told us about plans for the future with SuSe and Ximian.

So I think once they get it into the headlines, and if they are doing the face to face contact elsewhere in the world, Linux users and others will start seeing them as Opensource Linux company.

Re:Effective?

[mrchaotica]

That might indeed be a good idea. It sure helps me; I didn't even know Novell owned SuSE until just now!

Owning a linux company gives a lot more "instant credibility" than just trying to convert your old stuff to run on linux (which is what I thought Novell was doing before).

Re:Effective?

[Janek Kozicki]

"failed network company"

hey, I think "ancient network giant". Hmm it looks like a good name for a nethack monster :)

Re:Effective?

[Antique Geekmeister]

And don't forget handling an alternative user mailbox directory, the "~/mail" setting necessary to make IMAP play nice with pine run locally on the IMAP server.

Re:Effective?

[kinema]

Maybe they should do as so many have in the oil industry (i.e. ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips) and just concatenate the names of the two companies. NovelSuSE or maybe SuSENovel (I prefer the former).

Re:Effective?

[PaulusMagnus]

I do agree that Novell's branding is atrocious. Even at the height of their supremacy nobody really knew Novell's name, their logo or what they did. It was like being Seagate, techies knew them, ordinary people didn't know and a lot of IT purchasing then and now is still done by people with limited technical knowledge. Just as it was "safe" to buy IBM in the 80s, it's now "safe" to buy Microsoft.

I've been around Netware for 12 years and CNE'd from v3 to v6. They set the standards for certification, which everybody else has now copied. You also needed to know your stuff to get the CNE, something that isn't necessary for MCSE. I know because I got my first MCSE (on NT) from reading books and never touching the OS.

There are, allegedly, millions of Netware users out there. Having been involved in large Netware and MS environments the idea of scaling AD to work across the world on a 30,000 user system frightens me to death. I know I can do it with NDS but the flexibility of AD isn't there and would be highly unstable and be far more support intensive. The kludges Microsoft use to get their software to work is a pain to support but it looks nice and has a setup wizard so people get sucked in.

Therefore, I see that Novell's move into Linux is a very good thing as it gives an option for these large global networks to move from Netware/Intel to Linux.

Most people in IT also except that Linux is going to arrive, one day. However, the supportability of Linux is the downside of any corporate installation. Now we have Novell's support infrastructure backing Linux, everything is perfectly positioned for Linux to enter the corporate marketplace. I, for one, intend to certify in the Linux direction so that I can ride the crest of this wave as I'm confident that Netware to Linux migrations will increase in popularity and that in a few years time we'll have AD/Win2003 to Linux migrations happening.

Re:Effective?

[SpooForBrains]

* integrated connectivity to Microsoft Exchange

Technically this is true, but the connector basically uses Microsoft Outlook Web Access via HTTP. Nice toy, but I wouldn't want to use it in anger.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much of an improvement it was when they upgraded to active directory.

Irony \I"ron*y\, a. [From Iron.]
1. Made or consisting of iron; partaking of iron; iron; as,
irony chains; irony particles. [R.]

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

BETAMAX!

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not forgetting when NeXT bought Apple and changed their name to Apple! :)

Re:Effective?

[hal2814]

"When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first?"

I think of the company who renamed the most popular Linux distro on the planet in order to try to get businesses to pay attention to their Enterprise product line, but just ended up confusing the people who make product decisions but know little about Linux.

"When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?"

Honestly, I think of ZenWorks, which is a pretty cool sysadmin tool that currently works with or without NetWare (but I don't think is working on a Linux server yet).

I don't think that Novell is as much of a "failed network company" as you believe. They still make money every year and they're quite popular in most higher ed institutions I've spoken with and worked for. There are quite a few companies who make their entire living providing software to higher ed.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Next bought Apple using Apple's money. ^_^

Re:Effective?

[Bert64]

Active directory cannot be secured, even microsoft have admitted this...
The novell client wasn't bad atall, it was windows 3.x and dos that was the problem, and later versions of windows being designed to use their own networking components and hinder use of novell's.

Re:Effective?

[Snaapy]

When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

Mineral water.

In Finland, we have bottled mineral water called Vichy Novelle.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they called it "Novell Nterprise Linux Services"

http://www.novell.com/products/linuxservices/

Re:Effective?

[kelzer]

It's surprising that they're "worth" the same, since Novell's revenues are about 8 times those of Red Hat, according to their latest 10-K filings.

Of course, Red Hat is growing each year, whereas Novell has been shinking slightly (though they've maintained over $1 billion in revenues each of the last 5 years). And Red Hat has finally managed to make its first small profit, while Novell hasn't made a profit in 3 or 4 years.

But you'd think Novell's acquisition of SuSE would position them to be an important player in the Enterprise Linux market. And you'd think its stock price would reflect that.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, they should change the name to SuSe GmbH.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

>What do we think of when we say "SuSE"?

My girlfriend?

Re:Effective?

[EnderWiggnz]

>* integrated connectivity to Novell GroupWise

this is a plus? groupwise has got to be the absolute worst workgroup app that i've ever had the displeasure of using.

Re:Effective?

[Noksagt]

What do we think of when we say "SuSE"?
I ThINK ThAT WoRDS WiTH OnE LoWERCASE LeTTER ArE CoOL!!!
---
I guess I'm not surprised they changed their name to SUSE: I can just see the pedantic sys-admins giving their pointy haired bosses a hard time for writing "Suse" or "SUSE" in an email.

Now their only problem is that there is more disagreement on how to pronounce "SUSE" than how to pronounce "linux."

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well put, Novell is a failed network company.

But they do have all the bricks to get back into the game. They could package a real first class version of Suse Linux with all the bells and whistles. They could in fact "invest" (dirty word to MBAs these days) in aquiring market share by sending out their distro from free and charge for support.

After all, this is what open source and the new market models are all about, software including OSes are now commodities and cheap. It is the services you pay for.

Vendors need to realize gone are the days when you make a fat software sale and run away. If your not prepared to support your software you do not have a business model for the future.

Re:Effective?

[MtViewGuy]

When you think of IBM, does Jo Bloggs think of a Linux company?

Surprisingly, yes! Do you remember the number of television and print ads IBM ran a few years touting the fact that IBM is now heavily committed to running Linux on their S/390 and AS/400 big iron platforms? And these ads were aimed not only for the IT crowd, but the general public, too.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>What do we think of when we say "SuSE"?
>My girlfriend?
SuSE Q?

Re:Effective?

[mrroach]

It does use HTTP, but it's not doing "screen scraping" it's using the Webdav API which is actually pretty decent stuff.

SEARCH /exchange/mrroach/ HTTP/1.1

...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<searchrequest xmlns="DAV:">
<sql>

SELECT
...
Desired attributes
...
FROM SCOPE('hierarchical traversal of ""')

WHERE "DAV:ishidden" = False

</sql></searchrequest>

-Mark

Re:Effective?

[itp]

It uses the WebDAV interfact to Microsoft Exchange 2000 and above, which is only enabled when you turn on OWA. So you're right in some ways, but it's not like it's doing screen-scraping or anything like that; there's a genuine interface there that Evolution is using. I wouldn't call it a toy.

Re:Effective?

[nine-times]

It almost doesn't matter what the average guy thinks. I know people who when you say IBM, they think "Oh, they used to make PCs, but what ever happened to them?" or they think "My Dell is an IBM, right?" (by which, they mean that, in their mind IBM is the opposite of Macintosh. These people are still out there.)

And that's after years of large ad campeigns for linux, E-business, and utility-computering stuff. And even their ad campeigns didn't touch on things like the fact that they produce the G5's for Apple.

Anyway, Novel has just started, and already, when I hear 'Novel', the first thing that pops into my head is "When is Evolution 2.0 coming out?"

Re:Effective?

[nine-times]

You may be underestimating the Novel name. I know plenty of network admins and such, older ones, who remember fondly the reliable old Novel network they had running, and curse the eventual switch-over to using Microsoft, which they felt forced into.

For a lot of decision-makers in IT, there is a significant difference between being run out of business my Microsoft versus failing due to an unreliable product. And, in case you don't realize, it's the business sector that Novel/IBM are after (at least for the time-being).

Re:Effective?

[walt-sjc]

For those already in the linux groove, this would make sense. From a corp executive view, they never heard of SUSE but everyone knows Novell. The Novell directory system is also Very well thought of, and many larger corps use it over hActive Directory.

With 20/20 hindsight, naming your company and core product the same name may not be the best idea. With RedHat, everyone just thinks "Linux Distro", so it makes marketing other products and services Much harder as you have to break through that mindset. What if they wanted to start selling specialized hardware? What about an email server? (exchange replacement..)

Novell is in that same bind. What they also would not want to happen is what happened to Borland and their failed name change... (Note: I was working in Scotts Valley at the time and saw the name change on the building... I remember thinking - who the hell is Inprise? Some new company that leased the building?)

Re:Effective?

[CameronGary]

What don't you like about it ? I use it everyday at work and like the integration of the Address Book, Calendar, Reminder Notes, etc.

Have you used a recent version ?

Re:Effective?

[sloanster]

"Entwicklung" is such a great word...

The word SUSE is composed of the initials for "Software Systems and Development", or in German, "Software Systems und Entwicklung" - Entwicklung, of course, means "Development".

Of course when I hear SuSE, I always think of Siouxsie and the Banshees...

Re:Effective?

[_Sprocket_]

Technically this is true, but the connector basically uses Microsoft Outlook Web Access via HTTP. Nice toy, but I wouldn't want to use it in anger.

There's a big project going on at work involving the migration to Exchange 2003. I'm fuzzy on the details since I've just now been asked to do some pilot testing - for Evolution, no less.

One tidbit I've picked up so far is the ability for home / travel users to access their Exchange accounts with a native Outlook client - via HTTP. Whether it is using the WebDAV API or what's been called "RPC over HTTP", I'm not sure. I've been told that Entourage for OSX will be doing the same. So it would seem that this isn't just a hack from Ximian.

Re:Effective?

[DrWhizBang]

they're both about exactly the same

that precisely close to what I was thinking. And definitely almost a good observation.

Are you mostly completely following me?

Re:Effective?

[ckaminski]

Having come from a failed .com, let me tell you what little I know about rebranding. Take customers. You have customers. Important customers. The ones who've never migrated off of Novell 3.11/4 (whatever). Those customers are only going to stay on 3.x/4 for as long as their computers stay running. When those computers finally die, you don't want those customers, who don't know any better, getting any inkling that you've given up on them, because they'll go to your competitor.

Rebranding could hurt Novell in serious ways. For banks, I don't think it matters, a bank is a bank is a bank, and they are all out to screw us. For software though, a brand image (no matter how tarnished) is the difference between keeping a customer, and him fleeing to Microsoft.

Re:Effective?

[ckaminski]

Soos
Soos ee
Soos-uh <- official
soos-ay

soos-ee <- mine.

Re:Effective?

[dhanes]

*raises hand*

Yup, cut my teeth in the Nov 3.12 / Win 3.11wg back in the day. (S1 - S16? what the hells that? :) )

I still name my volumes SYS VOL1 etc... don't know if Novell originated that convention, but it's the first place I came across it.

CNE lapsed in 92, never looked back. Over the years had to support the odd 3.1x - 5 Netware box, always dreaded it.

When I heard they bought Suse, I started paying attention again. CLP here i come.

Re:Effective?

[Amiga Trombone]

Evidence? When I say "Red Hat" what do you think of first? When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

They really need to get to the point where people instantly think "Linux company" instead of "failed network company" when they hear the Novell name.

You have a point there, but I'm not really sure it's operative. They still sell their Linux solution under the SuSE brand. It isn't yet clear what branding they'll be selling their Linux networking products under.

Possibly they'll just bundle their Netware product with some server version of SuSE, in which case they avoid the baggage of the Novell name altogether.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Linux company, one in a dozen, happens to be the biggest." yeah, just 'happened' across it one day, not like they spent the last decade trying to take Linux out of basements and into companies.
Anyone who has used Novell seriously will agree that there is no equivalent to GroupWise, ZENWorks or eDirectory on the Linux platform
You're right up until now vender lock-in's have not been a part of Linux. You remember how technically great Novell was/is but I remember how many people were angry they couldn't leave the platform. For those who did leave or were in this posisition of leaving; Novell will need to try really hard to gain their confidence again.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

The application support and the customers just aren't there. Anyone who has used Novell seriously will agree that there is no equivalent to GroupWise, ZENWorks or eDirectory on the Linux platform and there are only lower quality alternatives for the windows platform. Bringing this to Linux could make Linux it a serious option for larger companies...

Indeed. Novell should do a port of eDirectory to Linux, and either charge a very reasonable amount for it or open source it, and bundle a basic low cost client suite for Windows, Apple, and Linux desktops. Then, develop some seriously powerful administration tools and advanced clients (ala Zen) and sell them at a more "corporate" price.

Here kids.. play with our eDirectory and basic clients on Suse. Do you like that candy? Want some more? Well look at all this spectacular stuff Zen and our advanced eDirectory tools can accomplish.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't, their turnover is too high to be such a company.

GmBH is in Germany what a private limited company is in the UK (ones with Ltd after), not sure what that equates to in the US...possibly the same?

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote they're both about exactly the same

Parent observed that precisely close

That my english skilz are the most best?

Even if it's too late to mod you funny (alrady posted here), you did make me laugh for quite some time.

The point I was trying to make is that 2.71+/-5% and 2.76+/-5% is about as exactly the same as stocks can be - they probably even had the exactly-the-same-to-a-few-more-decimal-places some time during the day.

Had I said "about the same", people would have assumed 'yeah, 1-5 billion". Had I said "exactly the same" people would have flamed because "2,710,000,000 != "2,760,000,000".

Is there a better phrase for two "fuzzy" values being exactly the same? Two people exactly the same height? I think not, because they stretch or shrink during the day.

I guess I should have gone with "completely and absolutely similar". :-)

Re:Effective?

[itwerx]

groupwise has got to be the absolute worst workgroup app

What's wrong with it?
As a long-time networking consultant I've ripped/replaced/migrated many different installs of both GW and Exchange going in both directions. The only complaints I've ever heard about GW were from long-time Outlook users who couldn't get used to a different interface. (So I switched it to look more like Outlook and hey presto, they loved it! :)
Now going the other way, GW -> Exchange, you never hear the end of it!
Not that that happens very often; usually 'cause some new CIO jumps in with a wild hair and wants to redo everything - 'course then I'm back in there the next year switching it all back to GW after the users have mutinied and the guy's been fired. (I don't care, it's all billable hours for me! :)
So anyway, what's wrong with Groupwise?
I really would like to know since whatever it is could be something I'll run into someday (more knowledge is always good!)

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should really forward this to the NetHack dev team. That was funnier than hell. It would really make my day if somewhere around 4:30am playing nethack I was attacked by a "ancient network giant" ... wonder what it's attack would be "the network throws up a boulder called netware... netware comes crashing down on you... you are blind"

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Falls apart after a while. It seems "Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu" now seems to be branding themselves as "Deloitte".

Guess they were tired of being known as toilet and douche

Re:Effective?

[dzelenka]

Maybe GNU/Novell?

Re:Effective?

[flacco]

i think about Ximian (and especially Evolution) and how that piece of software can become much better/bigger/worth more.

what i would love is a *cross-platform* evolution-like product, and a F/OSS groupware server on the back end. i've been hoping for that for four years...

Re:Effective?

[JAD lifter]

What do we think of when we say "SuSE"?

I usually think of the boot camp scene in Stanley Kubricks Full Metal Jacket where the drill instructor is screaming at the recruits about "Little Suzy Rottencrotch."

Re:Effective?

[EnderWiggnz]

first - i was forced to use it... abotu 4 years ago, and havent touched it since then.

it had a way of pegging the processor for silly things, and handling attachments horrifically wrong. it would corrupt the database almost weekly, and the system would crash annoyingly often.

it could have been the setup, or the sysadmin's maintaining it, or whatever - but from my experience i dont think that i would recomend it to anyone.

Re:Effective?

[Errtu76]

It's definately a plus when an application works together with as many systems as possible. This way you're not restricted to using whatever standard package is available for your flavour of workgroup app.

But being on /. i don't think i need to remind you of cross-platform applications .. software ... thingies :)

Re:Effective?

[Codifex Maximus]

When you say, "RedHat", I think: Dumped it for Gentoo.

When you say, "Novell", I think: They bought SuSE didn't they?

Let's look back shall we? It's 1999. Novell is pushing NDS and is fighting for it's life against NT's bid for the enterprise networking crown. Novell has one very stable networking platform and a world class directory service against NT's dubious stability and only just emerging ActiveDirectory.
I was really turned on to Novell 3.12 and it's ease of use and stability; Then I got my first Linux disk from a trade show. Well, that changed everything. I saw Linux as everything Novell was but with icing on the cake.
Now, it wasn't difficult to see that Novell was going to lose. I mean, Microsoft had their huge installed base of Windows users to draw revenue from. Novell was a business and had to make money - that is where Microsoft wins - they have more money. Microsoft spent alot of money, pushed harder and won the networking war based on their desktop dominance.
Enter Linux. Free, doesn't have to make money, stable, networking saavy, open source, standards based. Every one of Microsoft's strengths avails it little against this new foe; it's like stepping on ants. Each one is easy to kill but there are millions of em.

Now using this analogy, we have a turtle (Novell) with a bunch of ants behind it; they are taking on the 800lb Gorilla (Microsoft). It's gonna be an interesting fight.

My opinion: If everyone gets behind the LSB and makes a concerted push THEN I see some ground being taken.
YOMV

Re:Effective?

[DrWhizBang]

Is there a better phrase for two "fuzzy" values being exactly the same? Two people exactly the same height? I think not, because they stretch or shrink during the day.

that's a good question. I knew what you meant, I just saw the oxymoron-ish phrase and couldn't resist a little fun :-)

I think the funnines is because the phrase "exactly the same" is emphatic. If you said "they are virtually the same" I probably wouldn't hae been startled by the phrase.

Then again, I may have simply overlooked your comment.

So good work!

Re:Effective?

[GundyRage]

I just had to reply.

I live in Provo Utah (beneath the shadow of the Novell Mother ship).

Just yesterday I was talking to this guy about some problems he was having with his Windows mail server. I suggested he try a Linux solution running Postfix or something. He wanted to seem like he was all cool and stuff when he said, "Yeah, we tried to run Sushi. Have you heard of if? It's Linux." I said, "What is that? Raw penguin or something?

Anyway, he had no idea what Linux really was. He had heard of it but was shocked to learn that Novell had acquired SUSE.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Novell should do a port of eDirectory to Linux

Erm... EDirectory IS available on Linux, Solaris, AIX, Windows and of course Netware. This is not new info, EDir has supported those platforms for years.

and either charge a very reasonable amount for it or open source it

And you can download it for free to have a looksee... Its not open source though...

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you make me truly ashamed to be another Finn. Please go somewhere else to tout gibberish brand names invented five years ago for morons like you.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

> there is no equivalent to GroupWise, ZENWorks
> or eDirectory on the Linux platform

Thank merciful Jesus!

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure that the general public buys a lot of S/390's and AS/400's.

Re:Effective?

[itwerx]

Sorry you had such a bad experience!
That sounds like a terribly inept system administrator or actual hardware problems (which would still mean ineptness if they weren't getting fixed!)
If I were still consulting I'd offer my services! :)

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

aha.
then it is a bit funny that you don't
even know how to spell it.
NOVELL

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny though, you don't get to see that juxtaposition in the mainstream media. You only get to see Bush as deathly serious against terrorism...hmm. Well, at least someone is willing to show us what CNN won't.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat was worth $5 billion a week ago.

Re:Effective?

[nutshell42]

It's Software- und System-Entwicklung therefore SuSE and not SSuE - SSuE would be the acronym for SCO Shitty Unix Enterprises

Re:Effective?

[Why Should I]

It uses the WebDav API (over http) to get at the Exchange Store, which is currently the only recommended way (by Microsoft) to access the Exchange Store from any automated (non Outlook) environment.

MS even calls Exchange a Web Store and repeatedly says that the best way to get at it is to use it's WebDav interface in place of it's CDOEx API.

Another point to note: there is no other recommended way to get at Exchange from .Net other than Web Dav, and .Net is the way of the future for MS

Re:Effective?

[hdparm]

I've been through 2 rebranding exercises myself. One doesn't really count since it was publicly owned monopoly in utilities sector - their customers do not have anywhere else to go anyway. The other one was technical (IT) training company.

Now, I'm just a techo guy, so I wasn't directly involved but I took the opportunity to ask questions both times. The answer was pretty simple - you engage customers themselves as much as you can from the beginning. That way, they feel they are part of the process, get assurance that you actually think about them, not only about how regularly they pay invoices. They become part of the process, adding more momentum to it.

AS far as Novell goes, I see no problems with their NetWare 3/4 clients moving to different technology. Everything is evolving, technology likewise. Novell, I assume, had to hang on to those clients simply because they couldn't provide anything else - they didn't have any credible new products. With SuSE they do. Sure, they may lose some of the clients to Microsoft but I'm guessing they would get shitloads of new ones willing to utilise Novell apps ported to SuSE.

Re:Effective?

[sloanster]

OMG How did I screw that up? What was I thinking? (hangs head in shame)... Hard to believe I wrote that, which will teach me not to post before coffee...

--
Meine Seele brennt!

Re:Effective?

[yuri benjamin]

I hope Poopwise has improved since last time I had to use it.
I'm not trolling or tey to flame, but it was truly awful. Mind you, that was an older version. And on a windows platform. And it was the user interface that sucked - the backend may have been pretty good for all I know.

Re:Effective?

[Gilk180]

They really need to get to the point where people instantly think "Linux company" instead of "failed network company" when they hear the Novell name.

Did you read the article?

No, I'm not new here, but the article discusses exactly this point.

They don't want to be known as a Linux company or an open source company because they don't plan on abandoning their NetWare customers or at least they don't want their NetWare customers to abandon Novell.

This is probably a good idea. I know if I were to run a software company that happened to be based around Linux, I wouldn't want to be known as an OS company because of the connotations of zealotry that come along with the moniker. I would want to be known for using the right tool for the job, be it open source or proprietary or written in house under whatever licence you like.

Re:Effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

??? "failed network company" ???

That is narrow minded. You must be too young to ever use Novell. It was the ignorance of the upper management going with microsofts false promises. I have had 3.11 servers up for over 600 days before maintance. It was the failure of the IT industry that crippled Novell - never failed.

Re:Effective?

[Reteo Varala]

Hence the reason Novell did not do away with the various acquired brand names; such should give them an instant mindshare into the Linux arena. What is the first thing you think of when you hear SuSE? Just as I thought. Ximian? Uh huh.

Is Ximian dead?

[ablaze]

Ximian is dying a slow dead after Novell has acquired it last year:
The next version of Evolution is called "Novell Evolution", their Website is redirected to Novell and there hasn't been any significant update to Ximian Desktop for a while. XD2 is the only product labelled "Ximian" anyways.
I really would love to see some kind of roadmap or at least some kind of statement about Ximian Desktop. (As Novell provided for Evolution and Mono).

After they acquired Ximian they talked about keeping Ximian together and their products still being worked on. As I see it this is not the case and I feel very sad to lose Ximian eventually.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[salimma]

You could hardly expect them to continue packaging Ximian Desktop, at least for other platforms. Now that Novell owns its own Linux distro why would it be packaging a GNOME desktop for its competitors? Besides, Red Hat/Fedora has quite a nice GNOME desktop set-up; and packaging for Debian is rather hard since most of their desktop users are not staying with the stable Debian 3.0.

It would be quite interesting to see if they pull the same move on SuSE and call the next Linux release 'Novell Linux X' or something similar though. I'm curious to see what the desktop'd look like, having heard claims that it would bring the best of both KDE and GNOME together.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[puddpunk]

Just thought you should know:

Novell is combining Ximian Desktop 2 with SUSE linux (8.2 i think) to create "Novel Linux Desktop 1.0". This is looking to be their enterprise desktop product as Ximian Desktop is very easy to use and quite nice.

This is coming from a long-time KDE fanboy (but not going anywhere :) so listen to what I say!

The guy who came to speak at our LUG told us that the SUSE Personal/Pro distros will keep going to serve as a testing ground for their server software.

Cheers,
Chris.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[SpooForBrains]

It would be quite interesting to see if they pull the same move on SuSE and call the next Linux release 'Novell Linux X' or something similar though. I'm curious to see what the desktop'd look like, having heard claims that it would bring the best of both KDE and GNOME together.

Rebrading SuSE would be very very stupid, as SuSE has very highy brand awareness, especially in Europe (and by that I mean mainland Europe, particularly Germany - suprise surprise).

Novell is releasing their own Novell Linux Destkop, which is their own Gnome-based WM running on SuSE. Having seen a very brief preview, it looks similar to XD2, with the UI altered to be more "Windowsesque"

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[Erwos]

You've got it precisely right on the XD side, actually.

When a SuSE/Novell rep came to my university to try to pitch his wares to our Linux admin group, he said quite clearly that Ximian Desktop's going to be a Novell exclusive. That doesn't mean they're going to suddenly pull their source tree, but if you liked XD (and it's not bad!), you're going to need to move to SuSE. He also said they wouldn't be releasing a general Netware client program, but implementing it into SuSE. I'm assuming it'll be open-source, though, so there's nothing stopping Red Hat, Mandrake, GNOME, or KDE from simply integrating it themselves.

This change might be painful for Debian and some other distros, but Red Hat and Mandrake are rolling their own Evolution RPMs anyways, so it's not likely to affect them much.

As the parent points out, XD was largely superfluous for FC1 anyways, since it had most of the graphical config tools anyways. I can see why it would be a lot more important for Debian, though...

-Erwos

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[battery841]

After they acquired Ximian they talked about keeping Ximian together and their products still being worked on.

The Ximian hackers are still together. As a matter of fact, they moved into some really nice new offices in Cambridge from Boston. They are still doing what they do best.

Evolution: 2.0 is due out this year. It's awesome. It required a ton of work and most of the people who did 1.0 are doing 2.0, they're still there.

Ximian Desktop: Wait and see for this one. You'll see.

Connector: GPL'd. This surely isn't a bad thing from the open source community's point of view, is it?

Yes, maybe some of the branding is gone and the name Ximian isn't used as much, but it doesn't mean Ximian is dead. Far from it.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[nine-times]

Well, it seems like one of the shortcomings of Ximian was they were always late with support, and somewhat limited (when it comes to different distros, I mean). The only distro you could count on them supporting was Redhat.

So I don't think anyone will suffer if Ximian stops supporting other distros. It amounts to switching support from Redhat to SuSE. Plus, Novell seems to be open-sourcing everything (even YaST and Ximian-connector, which weren't open-source before), so, if another distro wants to include anything, they can. If the Ximian team, now part of Novell, comes up with some great new refinement, and Redhat (or whoever) likes it, go ahead and put it in your distro.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[gregeth]

As a few other people have pointed out, Novell is still working hard on Novell(former Ximian) Evolution. If you've looked at the beta releases at all lately they've completely changed the interface to something that looks a lot like Outlook 2003 (whether that is a good thing or not is left for another discussion). Not to mention that a lot more features have been added such as support for groupwise, and the exchange connector (although you can get that already for stable releases).

However, some of the biggest news is that they are completely overhauling Evolution in order to make a windows port.

There have even been rumors (although I can't find where I read it) that Evolution 2.0 will be written entirely in C#, and hence, the current speedy development of Mono. With the fact that they could make it multi-platform, Evolution could become a real contender against MS Outlook.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[salimma]

Novell is releasing their own Novell Linux Destkop, which is their own Gnome-based WM running on SuSE

Interesting; is this simply the next version of the 'SuSE Linux Desktop' - which was SuSE Personal + Crossover Office AFAIR - with GNOME replacing KDE, or will Novell still sell SLD?

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[Codifex Maximus]

Jesus H. Crist people! Stop thinking of Linux as this distro or that! IT'S LINUX! What is good for one distro is good for another. Novell should not be a distro producer or an operating system producer but an APPLICATIONS PRODUCER!

Now, get behind the LSB and get to programming. :)

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[SpooForBrains]

No, from what I've been told, SuSE will continue development of their own products in parallel to Novell.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[T-Ranger]

I seriously doubt that. In the last 5-7 years at the 4 or 5 Novell conferences/trade shows Ive been to there was on common theme: we are living in a multi platform world. Different hardware, different software, different OSs. And it is Novell who brings it all together with NDS/eDir, DirXML, and its prebuilt connections with damm near everything: Windows, Peoplesoft, etc, etc. (or so goes the pitch). They dont care if you arent running Netware exclusivly, they dont care if you are running Windows Server. There stuff works with everything. (well, most things). They make heterogeneous enviroments work not by replacing everything with Novell stuff, but by suppmenting everything with Novell stuff.

Furthermore, various Novell (server things) things that currently run on Linux run on a bunch of different distros. And the have stated that they will continue to support different distros. XD already runs on a bunch of different distros, maintaing that shouldnt be hard. Making XD exclusive to SuSE would be contrary to everyhing they have done in the last decade.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

There have even been rumors (although I can't find where I read it) that Evolution 2.0 will be written entirely in C#, and hence, the current speedy development of Mono.

I very much doubt there's any truth in such rumors, given that a) 2.0 is in code freeze, and b) all the development (1.5 branch) code is written in C.

From following some of the lists and weblogs, there are no active plans to write any core Gnome components (which Evolution is becoming) for Mono, since there's a lot of furious debate over the use of Java or Mono. It might happen in future, but not short term.

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

LSB had only 4 backing distro's if I am not mistaken. SuSE and TurboLinux were the two biggest I knew of. Red Hat Shuned the Idea along with Mandrake. Reasoning behind that would be simple to any business person. If Redhat and or mandrake conformed they would be commiting business suicide. People would buy the one with the cheapest support and make their own packages from source. Then dare I say it Gentoo emerges...

(Had to throw in the Gentoo Emerges Kicker)

Re:Is Ximian dead?

[Codifex Maximus]

> If Redhat and or mandrake conformed they would be
> commiting business suicide.

That's ok. Redhat and Mandrake can go the way of the dinosaur (Proprietary UNIX) for all I care. :P

As for Gentoo - you're preaching to the choir - I'm a Gentoo fan! Let me add my vote to yours.

Now, for something new:
I think the days of the distro are numbered. I would prefer if we just had all distros conform to the LSB and start producing APPLICATION software instead of another way to install LINUX.

Distros had their heyday and their purpose. Those days are over for the most part. Time to get the applications rolling! Developers! Easy to use IDE's, Applications! Games! Interoperability!~

SUSE

[phalse phace]

"Who's the #2 Linux vendor in the world? Would you believe Novell?"

Maybe it's because they acquired SUSE?

Re:SUSE

[toofanx]

Yes, that could well be the only reason they are #2 at something. This is also mentioned in the article. Apparently happened quite recently - Jan 2004.

What worries me is that acquisitions tend to have lots of problems. I myself was working in a .com that got acquired by a .bomb. It was a terrible experience. It would be a pity if SuSE went that way. We need to watch SuSE for the next year or so, and see what happens.

I would really hate it if Red Hat becomes the undisputed champion of open source. I do not hate Red Hat, but I dislike "undisputed champions".

Re:SUSE

[Antique Geekmeister]

RedHat (it's wone word, with no space in it!), is a useful set of tools, but has become too tied to industry partnerships to be an undisputed leader. Debian, SuSE, TurboLinux, Gentoo, Mandrake, PLD, the various BSD flavors, etc. etc., etc. all have feature sets and development models that are in some ways different and for some uses superior to RedHat. Don't worry about that possibility. Worry about Novell wasting marketplace time with an old closed standard, such as happened with Netware, and bleeding off "anti-Microsoft" energies and "don't single source stuff" energies from the purely open source world.

Re:SUSE

[Sunspire]

RedHat (it's wone word, with no space in it!)

No it's not, it's spelled "Red Hat" (22 times on that page).

Re:SUSE

[IANAAC]

What worries me is that acquisitions tend to have lots of problems. I myself was working in a .com that got acquired by a .bomb. It was a terrible experience. It would be a pity if SuSE went that way. We need to watch SuSE for the next year or so, and see what happens.

The good thing is, the best parts of SUSE are now opensourced, which means that if we as a community don't like what Novell's doing with it, we can always take it back.

Re:SUSE

[Antique Geekmeister]

They changed it again? Man, that's what I get for blinking!

Novell will do alright in the Linux market

[eadz]

They have something RedHat don't, sales offices world wide. They are really pushing the linux message, and are more free software (in beer and freedom) than the pre-Novell SuSE was : open source yast, free downloads for SuSE 9.1. Also they are porting most of their applications to run on linux.

Re:Novell will do alright in the Linux market

[w1r3sp33d]

I hope everyone realizes how important this point is. I work for a large consulting firm that deploys mostly ms servers, with a little red hat as required by our clients. Every engineer has at least one version of linux running on their laptop, as well as several sales and even management types. Nearly every engineer has at least a little novell experience and generally trusts the company (unlike ms who screws you over on lic, security, and bad updates) because novell always released a finished product (except netware 5.0 but I think most of us have forgiven them.) They are a nos company with a mainframe like mindset when it comes to product development, yes I think that is a VERY good thing for the people who depend on it. Now that novell is onboard many of us are switching (or adding because you will never get my slackware!) suse to our machines and following the news on novells other products being offered for linux servers, this will become our go to market strategy. I have not seen any reason to create a linux arm for the firm come from the red hat camp, but novell clearly does.

Re:Novell will do alright in the Linux market

[jimicus]

I'm going to be modded a troll for this, but what the hell.

You're quite right, Novell have a lot. But right now a lot of this is potential, not actual sales. We all hear this being the "Year of the Linux Desktop" (as was last year, as next year probably will be...).

I can see an IT revolution occurring in the next 3-5 years, as all the predictions of everything being web-based either come to fruition or come to nothing, Microsoft invent ever more onerous licenses and the various KDE/Gnome/(insert desktop environment here) developers improve their products still further. But, as with any revolution, there will be winners, losers, and also-rans-who-could-have-been-winners. It won't be easy for Novell, but they could easily be winners.

Unfortunately, they could just as easily be also-rans. Whatever happens, there will be a lot of hard work involved. Should be interesting to watch.

Re:Novell will do alright in the Linux market

[mab]

They have more than that the big thing they have is a directory service.

"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

[Quirk]

The article points out the crux of the situation.

"...the developer community has pretty much abandoned them."
"...With the shift in focus to Linux, Novell gains a huge developer base and not just from the open source community. Commercial vendors that support their products on Linux become selling points as well."

Steve Ballmer's famous hissy fit over the trial and tribulations of keeping developers happy spoke to Microsoft's efforts to keep developers on board. Ah they're such a fickle bunch. But the move to open source seems to be a good ploy to bring onboard an entire active community.

Re:"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

[Curunir_wolf]

Yep, this is going to be a big deal. I did some NLM (Novell Loadable Module) development for a while, and it was a really crappy environment to work in. One of the reasons people started throwing Windows boxes into the server racks.

And it's not just developers, it's also all the back-office tech guys that have been around since Novell owned the LAN. They know how much more difficult it is supporting a lot of Windows boxes than it is a lot of Netware boxes (plus you don't need as many). So these guys are now thinking maybe they can reduce some of those clunky Windows machines with Novell/Linux/SuSE alternatives.

The big hope is that those .NET developers (often pushed into that environment by gullible managers) can deploy those apps on Mono. Lots of folks see IIS (whether justified or not) as major vulnerability, security wise. From my experience, deploying an IIS installation that is both secure and will support everything the developers need is a major challenge. If Novell can make it happen with SuSE/Apache/Mono, they would have a lot of fans.

Re:"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

[qbncgar]

For those of us who support custom-developed applications, or any application developed exclusively for the Microsoft platform, there is a big problem with the way in which Microsoft attracted developers.

In essence, they provided overly simplified development platforms that allow complete idiots to develop code that works on Windows, and Windows only. Many of the people developing applications in Visual Basic, etc. have no business doing so, as they lack the fundamental skillsets required (processes, best practices, etc).

The further problem is that once a company has begun to put business information into a Microsoft-centric application, they immediately become ensnared in the spider web that is Microsoft licensing. The more data they put in, the more trapped they become. Once fully enveloped, they have to change directions any time Microsoft mandates it. Witness Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000, the advent of Active Directory as a requirement for many of their applications, etc. The fact that they de-supported a mail server meant that the upgrade to the new version of mail server involved upgrading every other server in your environment. Anyone who thinks MS won't do this again is nuts, this is how they drive revenue.

Ballmer very recently proclaimed that Microsoft needs a better sales message (presumably, hit the customers with a hammer until they upgrade) as people aren't buying the new versions of their products. They've become so feature laden and so impossible to maintain that nobody wants to fight with it.

In short, developers haven't chosen Microsoft as their platform of choice on it's technical merits. They choose it because it's easy. Any bozo can put up a Microsoft network, its easy. It isn't good or cheap, but it is fast. The market of these bozo's is pretty large, and all of them need software, so naturally, you develop to the biggest audience.

Any developer who does NOT develop an application to be portable between platforms, in this day and age, isn't worth the powder it would take to blow them to kingdom come. Laura DiDio's comment about healthcare companies not being able to go to Linux because of their applications highlights this point. If I were a developer looking for a new market, that's where I would be. Healthcare companies apparently have more money than sense.

IT services are easy to do badly, and difficult to do well. Microsoft is the equivalent of bleeding heart liberals, in that they empower total niwits to become IT professionals. The result? 30% of my companies incoming internet e-mail is infected with some form of virus exploiting a Microsoft vulnerability. It's been this way since February. There are a lot of morons in the world with public IP addresses connected to Microsoft servers.

The only thing that can help is to create a seamless / instant, or at least very pain-free migration path from Windows to Linux. Smart developers will be able to see that if the market looks to be shifting, they will need to be there when it finally does. If you have to write a new version of your application, why wouldn't you use any of the available open development platforms and make it cross-platform? Use Mono! Use C#! (Please, don't use Java). Use the web!

I would be willing to bet a paycheck that if a simple majority of developers offered cross-platform capable versions of their products, their customers would abandon Microsoft at the earliest opportunity (lease expiration, version upgrade, etc).

Re:"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

[Anonymous Coward]

In essence, they provided overly simplified development platforms that allow complete idiots to develop code that works on Windows, and Windows only. Many of the people developing applications in Visual Basic, etc. have no business doing so, as they lack the fundamental skillsets required (processes, best practices, etc).

This is all true. However, OSS has outdone Microsoft with PHP/MySQL and somehow created an even lower-brow development community than VBers.

Re:"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

[ClosedSource]

"In essence, they provided overly simplified development platforms that allow complete idiots to develop code that works on Windows, and Windows only. Many of the people developing applications in Visual Basic, etc. have no business doing so, as they lack the fundamental skillsets required (processes, best practices, etc)."

Actually, they have a lot of business doing so. Millions and Millions of dollars of business over the years. The fact that they (allegedly) don't follow best practices (which there is no consensus on anyway) is irrelevant.

"Any developer who does NOT develop an application to be portable between platforms, in this day and age, isn't worth the powder it would take to blow them to kingdom come."

Some customers want portability while other couldn't care less. Any developer or business that spends extra time and money on portability without regard to customer requirements will not be able to compete with those that keep focused on their customer's needs rather than their own software philosophy.

Customers are often dumb, but ignore them at your peril.

Novell has a good name with their customers.

[ron_ivi]

The company I'm at now is mostly a .NET shop, but with a handful of skunkworks linux/mono projects going on, either as prototypes or proofs-of-concept.

One if these was discussed with a rather large customer (government) who was surprised and very favoribly impressed to hear that the product was based on "Novell's Linux, and Novell's implementation of .NET".

Their core infrastructure - many dozens of offices across the state - is all based on Novell, who they have a lot of confidence in. I think there's a good chance they'll be wanting the "Novell .NET" solution when we ship the final product.

Re:Novell has a good name with their customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing your sales guy didn't pitch it as "some mexican kid named Miguel's hobby project that's running on Deb and Ian's Unstable OS"

Re:Novell has a good name with their customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Grandparent wrote: "Novell's Linux ...Novell's .NET"
Perent wrote: "some mexican kid...'s hobby...Deb and Ian's Unstable OS [Debian/Unstable]"

Funny? Seems more insightful.

This amateur image is probably the biggest problem with Linux in the workplace today. It's also IMHO the most valuable thing that Novell can bring to Linux. Novell having (developing/supporting/backing) a linux distro means even more to business than IBM doing peace-love-linux-graffiti-vandalism. Finally a Linux from a vendor my upper management will trust.

Open source hero? Bah!

[thewldisntenuff]

The open source heroes I know aren't Novell...Try PJ with Groklaw or all the linux-zealot /.-ers...(Yes, me included :) ) A better title needed indeed....

Anywho, if anything, I see SuSE and open source being Novell's savior, although it's previous history does not seem to indicate so...With the quality and issues with Fedora/Red Hat, SuSE has a remote (remote damn it, don't you all jump my @$$ for saying there are problems with Fedora, if you don't believe me, read previous /. posts about such issues) chance of taking the Linux lead. Novell/SuSE has had some successes recently (McDonalds, others, it's late and I won't bother to search) With the article stating 8/10 companies looking to upgrade in 04-05, it just might happen......

-thewldisntenuff

Who's the #2 Linux vendor in the world?

[NaDrew]

(Novell!)
You're damn right!

Who is the vendor that would face Microsoft and SCO?
(Novell!)
Can ya dig it?

Who's the vendor that won't cop out
when there're lawsuits and FUD all about?
(Novell!)
Right on.

You see this Novell is a bad mother--
(shut your mouth!)
But I'm talkin' about Novell!
(then we can dig it)

It's a complicated company
But no one understands it but Ray Noorda
(Novell!)

Depends on marketing strategy.

[miffo.swe]

Novell has mostly been geek centric while Microsoft has gone straight for the boss (who often dont give a rats behind about what the techies say). I think Novell needs to change its strategy and start making its name with the bosses too. Why not measure ROI and TCO on Novell vs. Windows? A real comparison where things like viruses and the likes is taken into the calculation. Then an ad campaign touting how much it costs to stay on Microsoft compared to migrating. Nothing appeals to managers and bosses like money.

Here in sweden most people dont even know what novell is even if most of them have been working on it, they just think its some extension to their workstation. Novell needs to get the word out to common people and not just us techies. We dont decide much nowadays (we bitch and moan but it isnt our call in the end).

Re:Depends on marketing strategy.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I think Novell needs to change its
> strategy and start making its name
> with the bosses too.

Oh please God no!

'nuff said.

Re:Depends on marketing strategy.

[Havokmon]

Novell has mostly been geek centric while Microsoft has gone straight for the boss (who often dont give a rats behind about what the techies say).

Exactly. What kind of person would willingly install a file server OS that does not have a real-time file salvage feature over an OS that _has_ had that since the early 90's?

I just can't get past that...

Re:Depends on marketing strategy.

[JJahn]

Novell still has serious mindshare among the PHBs as being a reliable network company. They have more of the mainframe type reliability, it will just work, period. If they step up the marketing and play on their networking experience, they can turn their company into something big. They have a great (I think the best for desktops) distribution in SuSE 9.1, which can just get better.

I would expect and hope to see Novell finally bring the Linux world a solution like Active Directory (ugh). An integrated solution that the PHBs can look at and say it saves them money. Novell has the networking products to do that, which are IMO superior to MS already.

Re:Depends on marketing strategy.

[FatherOfONe]

Here is the problem Novell had.

Novell comes in to upper management and talks about TCO and security and such. Managment agrees, and decides to keep Novell stuff for a while.

Microsoft comes in and says "since you are running our clients, we will give you are server for free. This includes Exchange/SQL Server ect." We can do everything that Novell does and we will be cheaper AND you will only have to work with one vendor.

Upper management then says that they are "standardizing" on Microsoft.

Here is the kicker though... They can't do that with Open Source stuff. The tech guys just load more and more skunk work projects on Linux and the company kind of loves it because it is free. I am sure this kills Microsoft, but it is hard to compete against free, even when you can leverage your client os.

Now for Novell they can stop spending development dollars on NetWare and focus on services. Specifically the can focus on managing the environment, and possibly making a great server for small business again. T

Re:Depends on marketing strategy.

[haruchai]

I'm sure that is a big part of their strategy. After all, Novell was making solid directory services long
before M$.
In fact, I think that, were it not for NDS and eDirectory, Novell might have died off years ago.

Well, yes....

[meringuoid]

Would you believe Novell?

Well, yes. Yes, I would. They just bought SuSE.

Owners of SuSE are second-largest Linux supplier: really, who'd have thought it? I eagerly await Slashdot's coverage of papal philosophical leanings and silvan ursine defecatory habits.

Re:Well, yes....

[cranos]

I eagerly await Slashdot's coverage of papal philosophical leanings and silvan ursine defecatory habits.

Niiiice.

Should Novell have lost?

[buckhead_buddy]

If Novell's products (Netware, WordPerfect, etc) were to be judged strictly on technical merits, how would they fare? Would an OpenSource Netware unburdened by ip restrictions and large implementation costs be widely adopted?

If these would be greatly beneficial and widely adopted, it seems odd that they haven't been more aggressively developed by Novell.

If their exit from the marketplace is a blessing in disguise, then it seems almost inevitable that Novell had to find a different product line or revenue stream.

Novell hasn't really been one of the vendors that I followed (due to their poor mac compatabilities) back in the dark ages of proprietary software so I'm very open to opinions of others on these matters.

Re:Should Novell have lost?

[hcdejong]

WordPerfect a Novell product? I think Corel would disagree...

Re:Should Novell have lost?

[mrchaotica]

Hmm... All I know about Novell is that my high school used it for distributing applications (i.e. you open the program and it downloads it from the server), and it sucked horribly (on 100MHz Pentiums running Win95 and a 10baseT lan using *hubs*).

I don't think the suckage was really Novell's fault (more like clueless admins + zero $), but it still left a bad taste in my mouth for anything related to Novell -- especially since distributing applications per use seems like a horrible idea to me, so by extension Novell is horrible for coming up with it.

Re:Should Novell have lost?

[Jim Norton]

The software you are referring to is ZENworks. That is only one of many ways to do it (here we deploy the application before we give it to the user. When giving them new applications, they will be installed automatically during the next NAL refresh)

Re:Should Novell have lost?

[hal2814]

Novell only owned WordPerfect briefly and according to our Novell rep, they kept the old WordPerfect (I forget the name of the original company) office buildings when they turned around and sold WordPerfect to Corel. He claims that they basically got nearly free office space out of the deal. They also got quite a few nearly new computers out fo the deal. Of course, that's a Novell rep talking, so he might just be trying to make the purchase look better in hindsight.

Re:Should Novell have lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell owned WordPerfect for a time before Corel picked up the scaps. Now go have mommy change your diaper little boy.

Re:Should Novell have lost?

[qbncgar]

I've used ZENworks since it became a product, I was a v1.0 beta tester.

Before you write off Novell completely, consider the following:

1) I have two helpdesk staff supporting 40 locations and 500 users across the US.
2) I have no other IT support outside our headquarters.
3) I can have someone whose PC catches fire, sit down at any other PC in the building and be back up and running in 5 minutes. With no intervention.

This is why you want to distribute per user, or entitle individuals to applications. You're leveraging the fact that identity is meaningful.

4) My helpdesk can reimage any PC back to known good, off-network, in less than 30 minutes, anywhere in my company.

This is why you want ZEN in particular. It provides a cohesive link between individual, PC, and applications, and allows you to centrally manage all of them.

Spend some time doing serious network administration at a big company, and you'll probably wish for ZEN or something like it. "Automate Everything", one of the core rules of system administration.

Evolution 2 seems to become all good!

[ablaze]

There is a blog on Novell Evolution 2 development. Very nice info on the status of that long expected update. Unfortunately it is now called "Novell Evolution":

http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/

Re:Evolution 2 seems to become all good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that unfortunate?

It is NOVELL's evolution after all. It's just brand identification, does that change the quality or the functioning of the software any?

Well for the name change... no. But hopefully Novell is doing good for the software.

It's still the same thing. They could name it "rose-ass email 3000 from Novell" and it wouldn't make a ounce of difference. Evolution by any other name will still kick Outlook Express's ass.

Re:Evolution 2 seems to become all good!

[Anonymous Coward]

And Gnomemeeting http://www.gnomemeeting.org is being integrated with the Evolution Data Sever(EDS) try it out at http://snapshots.seconix.com/

Novell - The silent giant

[DrSoCold]

Let's not be too hasty in cursing novel here. Remember, this is a long established company with a billion dollars in cash and no debts. Unlike Microsoft, Novell is a company that is very much in touch with it's community and always has been. Microsoft takes your cash, ships you a pony product then kicks you in the balls whilst the bells of the cash register ring. I have met so many Novell experts over the years who love the company and love the products and actually solved problems using them. Brainshare, Cool solutions, CNE, classic Novell stuff. I have never met a proper Microsoft expert and don't know if any exist. People tend to just support Windows 'cos it's an easy way to get a job' not because they love it and believe in the technology and the company. Novell breeds die hards, so does Linux, it's a match made in heaven, give it a chance.

Re:Novell - The silent giant

[mrchaotica]

You could rephrase that to say "people tend to support Windows because it's the most rational economic decision for them, while people who love Novell or Linux are irrational fanboys who use it because it might be the best at some point in the future"

It sucks, but it's true.

Signed,

Irrational Fanboy

Re:Novell - The silent giant

[DrSoCold]

rational - With business destroying security holes being discovered on an almost weekly basis, Windows as an enterprise platform is not my rational choice. The main problem I found with Windows was not the bug ridden and security flawed code but more the technical in-ability of the system administrators assigned the job of implementing and maintaining the software. You can get 25k per year jobs supporting Windows without knowing hardly anything about networks, security or computers in general. Try blagging a un*x or NetWare job, the sysadmin will bust you in minutes.

economic - Licensing costs for Microsoft products are the most expensive in the market, look at Office!. All you get for your money is girlie programs and a nice big hug and goodbye. And a licence is ALL you get, you do not own the software, it is not yours. At least with linux it's the closest you can get to actually owning software which you didn't write yourself.

I am more than happy for Windows to stay in the Market, because it is kids stuff and it leaves the big boys toys like un*x/Linux/NetWare to the pro's. The windows (experts?) have a common goal:

'one day I will be good enough to support Linux....'

Re:Novell - The silent giant

[mrchaotica]

Well, what I meant was that since it's easy to get those $25K/year Windows support jobs, lots of people do (since it's better than a McJob) -- that's their rational economic decison. They aren't the ones paying for the Windows licenses.

And when I said best, I was talking about ease of use with "best ease of use" defined as clicking the "OK" button in a wizard until the window goes away.

I wasn't trying to express the opinion of professionals, I was trying to express the opinion of the unwashed masses.

Re:Novell - The silent giant

[mrchaotica]

LOL... I managed to get modded "flamebait" despite "Signed, Irrational Fanboy" and my sig! Sucks for me!

And now this will be modded "offtopic," of course, but as an attempt to stave off that inevitability, here's a clarification of my previous post.

Re:Novell - The silent giant

[arc.light]

Novell hasn't had a billion in cash and zero debt for awhile. Their purchases of Silverstream, SuSE, Ximian, and four years of losing money had taken their cash down to about $300 million and change, then they recently took on $600 million of debt in a PIPE deal.

Still a lot of restructuring ahead

[Twid]

As an ex-Novell employee (pre-SuSE acquisition), I think Novell still has a lot of restructuring to do.

Before the SuSE and Ximian acquisition, Novell was going to focus on "web services" and spent a lot of money on a merger with Cambridge Technology Partners and an acquisition of Silverstream. Now, with Ximian they get Mono as well, but I don't really see a coherent revenue stream strategy coming out of Mono/Silverstream/SuSE (yet). Novell has a staggering product list right now.

There are:
- All of the old pre-Linux products like NetWare, from when Novell's strategy was network operating systems
- All of the identity products like eDirectory from when Novell's strategy was identity management
- The ZENworks product line for desktop and server management
- Four, count 'em, four different collaboration products, all from different sources (GroupWise, NetMail, Evolution, OpenExchange)
- The KDE-based SuSE Linux and the Gnome-based Ximian Desktop
- The rebranded Silverstream app server along with Mono

It's really quite a mess, and I haven't yet seen any strategy to clean it up. Novell's company page still pitches the "One Net" vision, which is a holdover from the Eric Schmidt-as-CEO days. I'd like to see a strategy for how Novell is going to bring all this together.

I'm still a Novell stockholder and I wish Novell the best of luck, I'd just like a little more clarity about how this is all going to come together.

Re:Still a lot of restructuring ahead

[SpooForBrains]

Actually, the do have a clear roadmap for consolidating all these products, and it goes something like this: eDirectory, ZENworks, GroupWise, technologies acquired from silverstream and so on are all going to be consolidated into one product group (the name of which I forget) which can be hosted on the Novell Kernel (in the short term at least) and on the soon to be released SuSE Enterprise Server 9. GroupWise Client and Evolution will be developed in parellel (although I suspect in time Evolution will become the core product in this area, as they are working hard to build groupwise functionality into Evolution II). SuSE will continue development of their own products exactly as they have done before (and to the same schedule) hence OpenExchange (or SLOX) will continue to be developed and supported (it doesn't compete with GroupWise anyway, they are playing for different markets). This also includes all of SuSE's other products on which much of novell's offering will be based. Okay, so maybe it's not clear, but there it is.

Re:Still a lot of restructuring ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... They all work together well on a single OS, Linux? (except for some of the e-mail stuff, maybe. donno).

That's Novell's point. Lots of many different software technologies, combined together on one universal platform (server or Desktop, Linux is better then most things out their).

You pay Novell, and they can replace your entire infrastructure with Linux-based solutions and rid yourself from Windows forever.

Or not. You want Windows desktops? Sure it'll still work. You want a couple Windows Servers, that'll be fine too. Whatever you want, how you want it. Just give use the money and the time and we will make it work for you. Linux is the glue that holds these technologies together.

That's what Novell should be saying.

Re:Still a lot of restructuring ahead

[OSgod]

Be very, very careful about the "they all work together on the same server" approach. That's windows selling point -- it's the sam OS across the enterprise and eveyrthing you want runs on it. The down side? You make a tweak to server for server based products and you may not want that on the desktop... you make a tweak to desktop and you probably don't want that on the server.

Re:Still a lot of restructuring ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what they used Netware and edirectory\dirxml for. it's good glue, but not selling.
why would it sell on linux?
people don't need glue,
they tie windows to windows.

Re:Still a lot of restructuring ahead

[T-Ranger]

OpenExchange and GroupWise are colab servers. Sure they both have clients, but just about everyone agrees that the GW client sucks. Evolution is a client. Ev in CVS has support for talking to a GW server. A good cross platform GW client alone covers the purchase price of Ximian.

http://www.suse.com/us/business/products/openexcha nge/slox_future.html says that Novell/SuSE are themsleves thinking about combining OE and GW.

Id never previously heard of NetMail. It seems to me that while GW is desigined for internal/intranet use, NM is desigined as an Internet mail system. It looks like it was once a supplement to GW, rather then a replacement. It seems not to be as popular, so while it isnt specificly mentioned in that doc above, its likely on the drawing board as well.

NDS, by itself, is next to useless. Even as "just" an accounts database, it isnt much better then what we had before. What makes it cool (and usefull) is when you have a bunch of things that can input data into it (like Peoplesoft), and a bunch of things reading data from it. That is, its usefullness is directly related to how much you use it. ZenWorks is insanely usefull, and it heavily uses NDS. The same applies to most of Novells products. This is called "vertical integration".

I agree, they do have a few warts in there product line, especially now after the Linux acquisitions. Some duplication of effort, for sure. Ya, they should trim down on the dups. But I think I see how it all fits together... I dont think they are in any market that they shouldnt be.

Trying

[Seven001]

You can't say they aren't trying. They certainly got my attention recently, and I never paid any attention to them before. I signed up for a free "Linux Technical Resource Kit", from them. It includes, quoting them:

This comprehensive Novell Linux collection includes the following on 3 DVDs (10 GB):

- SUSE Linux Professional 9.1 (Bootable Installation DVD)
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (ISO Installation Images)
- SUSE Linux Professional 8.2 (Installation ISO images for use with Ximiam Desktop)
- Ximian Desktop 2.0 Evaluation (ISO Image)
- Red Carpet 2.0.2 Evaluation (ISO Image)
- GroupWise for Linux 6.5.1 - Server, Client & Messenger (ISO Images)
- Novell Nterprise Linux Services 1.0 (ISO Image & NLS Companion CD)
- And more...

I look forward to trying out SUSE Enterprise Server 8, as I am / was considering moving to Fedora. Sorry, if you're interested, they aren't offering it anymore. Link Here

Re:Trying

[Builder]

Don't judge them too hastily on SLES 8 (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server). SLES 9 has gone gold recently, and the Beta's and the Release Candidates were FANTASTIC! Their admin / management tools are _far_ superior to the comparitave Red Hat Enterprise Linux tools.

Another thing to consider... Enterprise products such as SLES and RHAS will have a 5 year supported lifecycle. That means that you'll still be able to get security patches in 5 years time. Can you say that about your current version of Fedora ?

Re:Trying

[justanotheradmin]

I followed the link and they are no longer offering this kit. BTW - I used to have a CNE (4.11 days) and I even upgraded it to 5.0 when I had to a few years later. The problem was nobody (recruiters, employers, etc.) cared. That was back in 97. Then, later years I thought, "I'll get my CCNA! That will show that I know something, right?". After I got that, my boss said "what's that?". Then, all the recruiters who told me that I should have it suddenly decided it wasn't enough! That one expired about three months ago (it was good for three years) and I don't plan on renewing it. The only thing I have now is my MCP, which is in 2000 and about two years old. Which leaves me to my post name "justanotheradmin". Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not in a bad job, I get paid well, and oh, I have time to lurk \. so all is well. My point in replying is to say that Novell has never actually provided me with "free" software as long as I was a member of the CNE community and now, the first time it looks like it will happen, they are "not taking anymore orders". I guess I am complaining about that. Maybe it's just the empty ramblings of a first post new \.er that used to only lurk. If so, thanks for your time (which no doubt actually belongs to your employer at the time you are reading this. File this time under "industry research" and "staying current" as I have.

Re:Trying

[Anonymous Coward]

That means that you'll still be able to get security patches in 5 years time. Can you say that about your current version of Fedora ?

I _can_ say that about my "ancient" Debian Stable.

Re:Trying

[Anonymous Coward]

you can still get evaluation versions of sles 8
or download suse 9.1 personal edition
for free.
http://download.novell.com/pages/PublicSear ch.jsp
they even put up a linux
training kit with it, aimed at people who never heard of linux.
http://www.novell.com/maketheswitch?source idint=ln avtids2

Novell

[askegg]

Novell's strengths are no longer in the Network Operating System space, which is what made them. Nowdays their focus is on getting your network to act as one, regardless of the underlying operatings system or applications.

Take a look at eDirectory, which is far superior to MS AD and runs on almost any OS. Identity Manager (formerly DirXML) can syncronise information across your enterprise.

Zenworks delivers applications/patches to your workstations, servers, laptops and handhelds based on who you are and what relationship you have with the company (employee, division, position, customer, business partner, etc). Furthermore, it does not care how you connect!

Adding linux to the mix gives existing Netware installations an alternative future and piggybacks off OSS - smart move. For some interesting reading have a look at Open Enterprise Server - all your favorite Novell utilities on a linux platform. I for one will be making use of this....

Re:Novell

[fuzzybunny]

You're right about Directory. I have some serious problems with both ZenWorks and Directory when having to "integrate" them in to specific types of environments though.

Specifically, I'm referring to a project I worked on for a large insurance to get smart card auth (something Microsoft are actually fairly good at) for login working with ZenWorks, Checkpoint VPN and a number of other tools. Without going into details, it was a nightmare.

To be fair, in our case a lot of the problems were caused by a thick-headed insistence on using nwgina combined with a very specific set of requirements. We ran into timeout issues, authentication incompatibilities, whatnot.

If they manage to get everything working together nicely in a Linux environment, power both to them and to the poor bastard consultants who have to set up things like we did! :)

Re:Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that's why they bought Cambridge Consulting?

Re:Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

"Zenworks delivers applications/patches to your workstations, servers, laptops and handhelds based on who you are and what relationship you have with the company (employee, division, position, customer, business partner, etc). Furthermore, it does not care how you connect!"
Impressive! How is the problem solved? It uses TCP/IP?

Re:Gentoo

[jobsagoodun]

For me, it hasn't been optimization, but ease of use. I can't count the number of times with RedHat or Suse when I've wanted (for example) Apache+PHP+DB2+SSL or something, and its a right arse about if the distro designers didn't anticipate it and you have to get the source code anyhow, and configure it all by hand. With gentoo, I've found its much easier to get packages to play together nicley.

Quattro Pro

[tobyp]

Not sure how much credence I'd give an article which claims the Quattro Pro *spreadsheet* program is in fact a database....

Re:Cool!

[Frit Mock]

Oh, after the Apple one, 2 or 3 M$ dying Articles will follow ... I am pretty sure!

Help, we all will die !!!!

Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[Queuetue]

I never really had a use for Novell servers before - they were the 'ugly legacy black boxes' I usually was tasked with removing and replacing before this recent change in direction.

Now, Groupwise, Nterprise, Red Carpet Enterprise, Ximian Desktop and SuSe, in a tight package, intended to scale seamlessly all the way up and down the enterprise, all backed by a company with considerable name recognition and cash, and has been defending ground against MS for decades?

This sounds like it could be a killer combination - something that could provide a significant challenge to MS, in a relatively short time.

One thing I don't knoww about Novell - are they known to treat thier customers (or even the general market) reasonably well? I know there is an ancient SCO relationship, but not one that would indicate they support the current regime or direction over there, correct?

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[njcoder]

"I know there is an ancient SCO relationship, but not one that would indicate they support the current regime or direction over there, correct?"

Actually this is quite funny in my opinion. Back in they Digital Research's DR DOS had a rough time with Microsoft and IBM teaming up to kill it by charging $240 to put it on IBM PC's while Microsoft's DOS was being sold for $40. Novell bought Digital Research and at some later point Ray Noorda formed Caldera. He bought the rights to DR DOS for the purpose of pursuing a lawsuit against Microsoft for how they were unfairly priced. They won.

Years later, Caldera/SCO become one. SCO buys the rights to Unix from Novell. Sues IBM and others over Linux. At some point IBM gives $50million to Novell, for what purpose I'm not sure but they buy SuSE.

Why I find this musing (as a summary for those that have the attention span of a fruit fly) First scenario, key players, Caldera, Novell, IBM, Microsoft and a ass load of attorneys. Second scenario, key payers, SCO(Caldera) Novell, IBM, Microsoft and an ass load of attorneys.

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[Chemicalscum]

"At some point IBM gives $50million to Novell, for what purpose I'm not sure but they buy SuSE."

The purpose was to buy SuSE.

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[OSgod]

The worrysome point here -- remember when Novell tried to break the mold and strike back at MSFT before? A billion dollar purchase of Word Perfect and grouping it with other apps to take on the desktop suite of the day (MS Office, how times have not changed)...

So what happened to all those satisfied Novell office suite users? They were dumped.

(Founding member disgruntled Word Perfect users anonymous)

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[psychoid]

I've used Novell products since '91 and can say from experience:
1. Novell's products have always been top notch
2. Novell's support community is great and you won't hear, "Hey, N00B, RTFM"
3. Novell seems to respect their customers and does not force feed them crappy products with forced upgrades every two years
4. Novell has inspired great loyalty among those of us who have used their products over the years. In order to foster this loyalty, a company must produce technically superior products and have a great support ecosystem

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[glsunder]

I've only needed to use Novell's email support once, and that went pretty well. The email was a simple question about migrating a NW5 server to new hardware, which went smoothly. All other times, support.novell.com worked well enough for me.

Generally, I can tell when the last time we had a power outage that outlasted the ups was by looking at the uptime on our Novell server (our linux servers stay up just as well), so there hasnt been much need for support.

I will like being able to use Linux instead though. We have one 3rd party program that can mess up if the wrong thing happens and won't unload without a reboot of the server. There doesnt seem to be a kill -9 type command in novell (if there is please reply). But, it's rock solid as long as you're careful with that app.

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[Anonymous Coward]

good point!

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[njcoder]

I'm always wondering what the real motivation for IBM's investment was.

Are they pushing more for SuSE on IBM over RedHat, is this going to be another big blow for RHAT?

Why didn't they just buy SuSE directly? Was having a lapdog buy it sheild them from any forms of criticism? Antitrust issues? Or maybe their licensing of unix would prevent them from buying it?

Did they help Novell buy SuSE to keep Sun from buying it? Or did they do so to give Sun a hard time with their Java Desktop System which runs on a modified SuSE?

I don't think it's safe to assume that IBM has completely cleaned up it's act since the 80's and people should be giving a close look to some things it does no matter how many lines of code they contribute to the linux kernel. Whether it turns up to be nothing or not, big companies should be watched and not given a blank check to do whatever they want because their "open source friendly"

Re:Not "winning back" loyalty, but maybe winning.

[Night Goat]

You're right, Novell's tech support rocks. I learned half of what I know about Novell's products from their support staff and free literature, and an additional quarter from their knowledge base. If you need something done, you'll be able to figure it out. All of their manuals are on-line, and between those, their really nice KB, and the support groups, you'll get the answer you need.

Re:RIP...Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I should no better to pick on the BSD Gods.... they have so much "Mod Power!" Darn... foil'd again....

PS. I'm not a TROLL...just want to make a jok.. Ok maybe a little troll....

Novell Visited Our LUG

[terrencefw]

Novell (specifically Mark McManus and Simon Lidgett) came this week and outlined their Linux strategy in a talk to our LUG, WYLUG.

They seem to be pretty fired up about stuff. Their next generation product will be "Open Enterprise Server", which can run either on Netware or Linux as a base OS.

They seem very into cross-platform and compatibility, in particular with respect to authentication, single sign-on and all that.

Re:Novell Visited Our LUG

[SpooForBrains]

Simon Lidgett was running the technical demos on a load of Novell Linux knowledgeshare events that I went to. Great bloke, very enthusiastic about their push towards Linux. Although a slight tendency to tell very bad jokes about football.

Did they show "Lord of the Net, the two servers"?

... and where did the money come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is my understanding that originally Sun Microsystems were trying to buy Suse but IBM were extremely worried about this because they would then be left with working solely with Red Hat. They didn't want to buy either Red Hat or Suse themselves since they wanted to maintain a choice of independent distros in the market. This would allow them to incorporate Linux into their tech stack without being held to ransom by an OS "vendor" (think MS-DOS. The OS being a "commodity", where they can continue to have an inside track to keep ahead by putting resource into the open source community, allows them to compete effectively in the middleware (Websphere) and dbms (DB2) space - amongst others. IBM software revenues are about $9bn so this represent a tiny investment to secure your platform.

The solution was to give (invest in) Novell $50m to help them outbid Sun on Suse.

And giving their customers an upgrade path from Netware and still use all of the other Novell products (NDS etc). So long Netware.

And I agree with the developers, developers developers points that people are making. It'a about them!

The problem of Novell is ...

[Akimotos]

their loyalty. Let me explain. Back in the '90s I ran a salesdepartment of a big IT shop with big customers. All my salesguys worked on a basic pay, with a great bonus. Then came the millennium saga ....
They all got training .. you can upgrade this application with this update and that application with that upgrade. All my guys made the quotation on their customers: what are they running now and how am I going to make the most money out of their upgrade.
More than one of those guys earned a second home just by upgrading its customers to Windows. Why Windows? Because Microsoft forced customers into buying whole new license packs, with new software. Even customers running older versions of Windows. It were the days that we simply couldn't find enough people to install and implement upgrades. Microsoft couldn't even ship CD's, licenses and boxes fast enough. In the end we did complete conversions from blanc CD's and provided the customer with its formal material later. And crew was even worse: we sent whole groups of 'people_handy_with_computers' off to South Africa where we bought MCSE documents, just to be able to put them on jobs in Europe...
Oh, and Novell? They simply produced upgrades, even for aging versions of their OS, like 3.12 and such. Each upgrade was about $200 (or something) with which you could make your server OS millennium proof. 3.x went to 3.2 and 4.x went to 4.2. And that was it... my Novell guys just sold a handful of CD's, didn't earn a second home on bonusses, but scored a ten on customer satifaction. And the problem was that Novell informed all customers about the possibility. My guys simply didn't have the opportunity to scale 'm up from 3.x to 4.2 or even version 5.... every customer was already informed about the $200 update kit for the 3 and 4 series.
Since most salesguys don't have a heart or basically don't care about quality (it's just about the bonus), they simply advised customers to ignore the opdate: it's better switching to Windows... you see, I have a second mortgage to pay ...
It was terrible to see such a nice product becoming a victim of its customer loyalty, especially since the Windows customers simply didn't (and still don't) see that they are being toyed with.
And I? I left the circus in September 1999 on 'matters of principle' ....

Re:The problem of Novell is ...

[EvilNight]

*BAM* Home run.

Novell was punished by its salesforce for doing exactly what its customers wanted.

I think, these days, there is a growing awareness that the cash hemmorage of maintaining a Windows environment is not the only way to run an IT department. As departments grow wiser, they'll begin looking for solutions that are more like what Novell (and Linux) has always provided and less like what Microsoft is offering. After all, isn't Novell's style of product maintenance what everyone has been clamoring for lately, and incidentally almost exactly the same thing Linux provides by its very nature? It seems like a perfect match to me, especially with IBM thrown into the mix.

Oh, don't overlook the fact that Novell has a grudge against Microsoft for trying to crush them for all these years... and so does IBM for the backstabbing Microsoft gave them long ago... oh and so do most Linux camps for various other reasons. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, especially when he's no real threat to my own business structure. This is a big deal, folks. I hear the sound of an army gathering its forces.

There was a window for capitalizing on stupid users, techies, and managers, and while that will never completely go away, I think we're nearing the time when IT shops, in general, are finally beginning to wise up a little. Novell and Linux are on the radar.

What would make them a FOSS hero?

[darnok]

Release OpenExchange as open source.

In many sites, Exchange is the one MS product that is irreplaceable infrastructure. I know, alternatives exist, but plugging together 12 different pieces of FOSS with differing licences isn't something that a lot of IT departments are comfortable with. They'd rather live with their regularly unscheduled Exchange outages, thanks very much!

If OpenExchange was free, it would go close to being a drop-in replacement for MS Exchange. With a company the size of Novell behind it, it would be a much easier sell to those companies than plugging together a bunch of FOSS server products, most with no big vendor behind them.

Novell would get a *lot* of mind-share in these organizations, as they'd be the enablers for getting MS out of their core infrastructure once and for all. I'd bet they could leverage this mindshare when it came time to upgrade those desktops as well.

Well, Novell, what are you waiting for?

Re:What would make them a FOSS hero?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they want to open up OpenExchange? This would kill sales of their Groupwise product (which in my opinion is a better product than exchange). Their whole push into linux is to give them a hip OS platform to sell their server products for. Their goal isn't to ship out $50 boxes of a server product that is to compete with a $10,000 m$ server line.

Re:What would make them a FOSS hero?

[Anonymous Coward]

OX is a very, very nice system, and being a desktop linux user the webmail client walks all over exchange's; however it isnt a drop in replacement for exchange, the lack of migration tools is a real pain, they keep promising them but its been over a year and despite the promises from SuSE, there not on the horizon.

There is also the issue that SLOX is essentially two seperate products glued together with perl scripts, the email developed by SuSE from SLEMS is entirely seperate from the groupware developed by comfire and netline, neither of whom may want to loose their revenues.

Finally SLOX is insanely cheap as it is, especially for the education market (240 with 50 concurrent client licenses, with 50 more for 220), if and when the migration kit arrives it'll kill off any surviving exchange 5.5 servers. If you want free use Squirrelmail with plugins.

Re:What would make them a FOSS hero?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft defeated Novell by providing customers with a cheap alternative to Netware.

If Novell provided a cheap alternative to Exchange Server then they could use the same strategy against Microsoft.

Then if they ported parts Ximian to Windows, you've suddenly got a whole new class of Windows users who wouldn't need to talk to M$'s Exchange server and whom you could one day migrate to Linux.

Talk to them, hear them out

[Zaffle]

I'd like to just say, hear them out.

I've recently attended a couple of Novell presentations, and also attended a free Novel Linux Salesperson training course. They aren't all that bad. At least in New Zealand, they are really making an effort. They've contacted the local LUGs, made presentations. They offer a pretty good selection of courses, and some of them free or very low price.

I've never really bled red (supported Novell) before, but I'm starting to be swayed.

So go try 'em out. Go find a local Novell office and ask when they are doing their next presentation regarding Linux. I've been pretty impressed so far, they've been very receptive. We had the head of something-or-rather from Asia Pacific Novell at the Linux Salesperson course, and attending the course what the CEO of one of NZ's leading Linux companies. They knew what they were talking about :)

Some years ago...

[Vitus Wagner]

Some years ago there were few significant competitor s to top Microsoft Products:

Word Perfect (to Word)

Quattro Pro (to Excel)

DR-DOS (to MS-DOS)

Once Novell acquired all these product and effectively drive them out of market.

Re:Some years ago...

[PaulusMagnus]

WordPerfect and Quattro Pro were only real competition in the DOS world. Their Windows equivalents never really stood a chance as Microsoft gained a head start on everybody and based their feature sets on these products. Everybody was playing catch up with Microsoft until they finally accepted defeat. DR-DOS is still alive today but then again, the market for DOS isn't exactly large any more. I also think that Novell's move into application software was badly timed and made them take their eye off the ball with regard to Netware and their NOS. They've been battling ever since and done a pretty good job of standing up to the M$ Marketing Machine.

Re:Some years ago...

[Duhavid]

In the beginning, there was Word Perfect and Lotus 123. These were the big products of their day, and they had a DOS command line, "function key" driven interface ( yes, lotus used the slash key.. go away, boy, you bother me.... :-).

Then Windows 3.0 came out. It ran on top of DOS, so it was easy to adopt.

MS bought Excel, and started producing early versions of Word. Since they were MS products, and MS was promoting Windows 3.0, these applications utilized the Windows GUI ( and dont forget that the printer driver was part of Windows, not the individual applications anymore ) to a good advantage. The other application vendors did not know which way the wind would eventually blow, so they were late to adopt the Windows GUI, as the cost to support the various desktop schemes of the day and DOS was prohibitive. And there was likely some unwillingness to give MS any additional credibility by supporting their new baby. There is a reason for the old "dos isnt done till lotus doesnt run" slogan.

Revenues started to tilt in MS's favor, and we found ourselves in the "nobody was fired for buying MS" days. Integration with the OS and support for the OS, dontcha know.

The Word Perfect company sold itself / was aquired as there werent revenues sufficient to sustain itself anymore. I forget to whom now, but it wasnt Novell, and the damage was done before ( and continued after ) this sale. I think Novell picked it up as part of its fight against MS.

The Lotus company "merged" or somesuch a period after that, I think, with IBM. Again, the damage was done previously.

Borland, owner of Quattro Pro never seemed to me to be a big player. I expect they sold Quattro pro off to put some cash in the bank and to allow them to continue with there core business of compilers ( Pascal, C++ ). Again, Borland not knowing where things would land, straddled the line. Also, they could not support the new MS technologies as quickly as the MS tools people ( suprised? ) could, so if you wanted to work in the MS world, you pretty much had to use the MS toolset. MS, AFAIK, made sure that that playing field was not level. (This is one of the data points on which I dislike MS's business tactics).

I am sure that some will say that these players should have seen this coming, and that MS was just forsighted to have made the decisions they did. I would say no, it was not at all clear at that time that Windows would be the player it became. Hindsight is 20/20, forsight is not. And MS is not gifted for having chosen things the way they did, they were tied to the new "operating environment" to promote this new "operating environment", not because of any technical decisions.

So, on the idea that Novell ran those products into the ground, no, they didnt.

They bought DR-DOS, to run against MS-DOS. DR-DOS was, in that day, considered at least even with, or technically better than MS-DOS, but the marketing machine that is MS drove them under. Lots of FUD, I recall seeing warnings that DR-DOS wasnt MS-DOS, and that MS couldnt be responsible or somesuch... ( sidebar, I installed a windows 3.x version on top of a dual boot DOS/OS/2 installation. The windows installer detected that OS/2 was on the machine ( why? ), and told me that there was some other OS that I was probably not using on the machine, would I like the installer to remove it to free up the disk space? If I had known less about my machine, I would probably have told it to do it. I am positive Joe Sixpack ( course, how would Joe Sixpack get OS/2 on his / her / it's machine... ) would have said yes. )

Novell also purchased USL as a defence against MS. I think they then realized they had bitten off more than they could chew, and sold it off a few years later.

Why did they do these things? In my opinion, they were afraid that MS would hide and marginalize Novell servers, and eventually replace them once they were just machines sitting in the server room that the people at the desktops di

Maybe because mono is already dead :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Icaza is MS zealot, ok we know that since he just claim it himself. But why some people still spend some hours at coding this stuff ?

They know they will never manage to be complient if the Microsoft platform because specification are not available (but the core spec under ECMA), and they are trying to shoot a moving hare ...

As a fact, this mono is a dead-born project.

Small and Medium Business

[managementboy]

I believe Novell has a good standing to start to win back small and medium business, as long as they can show how these porblems get resolved through their offerings:

* Licencing cost are low(er) compared with rivals
* Costs due to Viri don't exist in Novell's SuSE offerings (business men know this problem first hand)
* Costs due to Spam get significantly reduced due to Novells SuSE offerings (business men know this problem)
* Security is inherently high (business men know this problem)
* Single signon and other Directory services are good for business (business men know this problem)
* OpenOffice is free and compatible (free is allways good, as long as you get support... Novell enters the stage)
* Novell removes the nerdy part of Linux and makes it business man friendly

These are not technical arguments. They would be the ones I would use to convice any owner of a small or medium business to use Novell's products in an upgrade cycle (from win95, from Oracle 8, from IE5 etc.).

In the Novell development center...

[DungeonCoder]

Ximian guy: The next distro is focused in GNOME.
SuSE guy: No, GNOME is crap, KDE is the focus.
Ximian guy: KDE is kbloated!!!!!!!!
SuSE guy: STFU dwarf!
Ximian guy: STFU you nazi german!
Microsoft guy (only watching): Round 1! Fight!

Re:In the Novell development center...

[Anonymous Coward]

i recently witnessed a presentation by a ximian guy hosted by novell, and it was basically one side of the conversation above. something makes me guess that were a SUSE developer present it would have ended in fisticuffs.

Caveat !

[foobsr]

There is a caveat in the ranking of Linux vendors: Novell is No.2 if you don't count IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which probably sell most of the Linux software going into the enterprise market.

loc. cit.: "If Linux is free, why's it so expensive?"

Good point. Think about it. Think if the system as it works really is a s free as intended.

CC.

Didio quoted

[chadm1967]

I see that our friend, Didio, was quoted in the article........ :-(

Re:Didio quoted

[ddusza]

Ah yes, the Microsoft Pep Squad. Ever notice that she appears whenever there is an opportunity to slam any non-Microsnot company? I am sure the Yankee Group is the best group that Micro$oft Money can buy.

Novell and IBM, sitting in a tree

[wowbagger]

One of the problems Novell (and Microsoft) has, as a network server platform, is being tied to the ia32 platform. This meant that if you wanted a file server with boatloads of RAM to cache data, you slammed into the 32 bit address limits (yes, I know, 36 bits on later processors, but that is an ugly hack - bank switching once again.)

Novell has realized that the OS the server runs is largely irrelevant to the users - they just care about the SERVICES the server provides. Migrating away from NetwareOS to an OS that supports 64 bit platforms allows Novell to break through the 4G barrier.

So, what do you want from your file server? Massive RAM, MASSIVE DISK I/O and even more massive network I/O. Reliability. Fault tolerance. Expandability. Hot-swap EVERYTHING.

Now, name a vender of server iron that meets those specs. I know of a little company that can do that - so little they only need three letters for their name. A company who's middle name literally IS "business".

Imagine what would happen if Novell made Netware services available on the IBM zSeries or iSeries. Now you have a platform that supports massive quantities of FAST disks, smart disk I/O subsystems, smart network subsystems. A system that can sense a failing disk and phone home - you come to work in the morning and an IBM tech is waiting at the door with a replacement disk before the disk fails, swaps it out in a minute, and you users never notice.

A system where if you find yourself a little light on CPU, a phone call fixes the problem. A system where you can run multiple virtual servers as needed. You want database? Run DB2, either on the Linux image or under OS400/OS390.

A Novell/IBM teamup would be SCARY compelling for IT managers world-wide.

Now, I don't have any insider information, but I cannot beleive that this is NOT being worked upon in Deep Dark Places at Novell and IBM.

Re:Novell and IBM, sitting in a tree

[SpooForBrains]

It's public knowledge that Novell and IBM already have a partnership where Linux is concerned. They make it no secret that IBM invested heavily in the company to assist their acquisition of SuSE. In fact, IBM has been present at all of Novell's Knowledgeshare events, making presentations, and have made no secret of the fact that they helped Novell acquire SuSE because they didn't want to see any dominant player in the Linux marketplace (SuSE now has the corporate clout to give Redhat a run for their money).

Now that SuSE is part of their strategy, Novell are moving to make their products available on the entire set of IBM hardware.

So they are in fact already doing exactly what you've just said, and making no secret of it, either.

Re:Novell and IBM, sitting in a tree

[Rebel_Rebel]

Wasn't that idea called "NetFrame" ?

Re:Novell and IBM, sitting in a tree

[jman251]

" I know of a little company that can do that - so little they only need three letters for their name." SCO? Wow, they've really turned things around.....

Re:Novell and IBM, sitting in a tree

[nine-times]

Not even in the "Deep Dark Places". When Novell announced the purchases of SuSE and Ximian, they said they were planning strategic partnerships with IBM. I think the aquisitions were even partially funded with IBM money.

Personally, I've thought for some time that the behind-the-scenes plotting is really over the desktop. Like you said, no one cares what their servers are running, so long as they can access the services they want from the desktop. But more than that, no one cares what their DESKTOP is running, so long as they can access the services they want and they have the applications they need.

One of the threats to Linux on the desktop is, ok, you make the Ximian Exchange connector, but MS can change the Exchange server and make the connector stop working. You can make Samba improve desktop access to a Win2K network, but when Windows Server 200? comes, they can change the SMB protocol a little and force Samba to play catch-up. So, IBM and Novell work together to make the switch-over from Windows2K networks to Novell-based networks nearly trivial. They then work together to make the Desktop switch to Linux nearly trivial, which should be easier if you control the servers.

But why would IBM want Linux on the desktop so badly? Because once Linux is on the desktop, switching to a PPC based architecture is nearly trivial. If IBM wants to be a player in the Desktop processor market, essentially taking on Intel with the equivalent to the G5, they need to go through Microsoft to get support. Unless, that is, people are running Linux, which already has support for PowerPC.

It's a bit of a conspiracy theory, with absolutely nothing to back it up, but I have a hard time believing that no one at IBM has realized the possibility.

Re:Gentoo

[binary paladin]

Yeah, it hasn't been the speed for me (seeing as I haven't noticed a difference anyway) but the ability to mess with the compile time options in a really, really convenient way.

That I find that Gentoo's startup scripts and the way /etc is managed are much cleaner than some other distros I used to use.

web services is key to a linux rollout

[codepunk]

No actually the web services arm is one of the most important parts of the puzzle. I work in a manufacturing company and we run linux thin client desktops on the entire shop floor. This would just not have ever been a option if it had not been for a single web service we built that converts autocad drawings to pdf files for viewing at the workstations. Web services is a great way to get that little extra functionality available to the linux machines. Most of the cad stuff is only available on windows, I had no option but to render drawings using windows servers.

We use web services for plenty of other stuff but if you need to do cross platform integration there is nothing sweeter.

Excuse me?

[bryanp]

utterly losing the LAN market to Microsoft.

In the server room 30 feet from my desk I have 21 servers. 3 of them are running Novell Netware 6, the rest of them varying flavors of NT Server, 2K server and 2K3. There's a reason I'm running 3 large office buildings worth of users on only 3 Netware servers - because that's all I NEED to do it. If you look out there you might say "Well, Microsoft has 18 server installations to Novell's 3. Microsoft is winning." You'd be wrong.

Re:Excuse me?

[voideng]

In my shop we have about 400 servers, 80 of them are Netware which does all of our file and print, the rest are NT/2K servers each running a single application becasue of stability problems with NT/2K. Our parent company uses NT/2K for everything and has pushed us to move to 2K for file and print, but they can never make the business case, so we still have our servers.

Re:Excuse me?

[cmason]

If you look out there you might say "Well, Microsoft has 18 server installations to Novell's 3. Microsoft is winning." You'd be wrong.

Yes, except, how many licenses did you have to buy? Who's really winning?

Re:Excuse me?

[Duhavid]

Yes, they are currently winning the revenue battle. In doing so, I would suggest that they are alienating more and more of the developers, developers, developers and business people that they depend on for those revenues. I think that a large part of the hostility / angst / disaffect about / against MS on slashdot has been prompted by *how* MS is winning this game. I think, ultimately, that MS will alienate itself into a minor player.

Gentoo is not just source based.

[micolous]

Did you not know that you can install binary packages using Portage? Look at GRP. Your options are limited in what they're compiled for and you don't have the control you have with source, but you still have quite a bit of choice in what binaries you want to use. See here.

As for compiling yourself and any speed improvement, that's dependant on what CFLAGS you use and how fast your computer actually is, and what processor you have. Some people won't notice a difference, some people do, and the people that do notice will notice it in varying amounts.

There's also binary packages in "regular" Gentoo for packages like the Flash plugin, NVidia/NForce drivers, Java and some games, which fall in the "non-free" category (ie: closed source). There's also ebuilds for some commerical games (that you have to purchase).

Now all Novell needs to do is deliver.

[hal2814]

My upper management is pretty excited about Novell and Linux, but the Novell Linux offerings I've gotten from them so far are not quite ready for prime-time. The SUSE distro is ok but hasn't really changed since the Novell takeover. Nterprise Services for Linux has a long road ahead in order to be a good stable product. I'll reserve judgement on Novell until they are putting out production Linux services and integrating their acquired software into it. Until then, it is pretty cool that I can log a user in via the Novell client authenticating to a Linux box.

Re:Now all Novell needs to do is deliver.

[sloanster]

The SUSE distro is ok but hasn't really changed since the Novell takeover.

Huh? If you don't see any difference between suse 9.0 and suse 9.1, you're not looking.

Suse 9.0 was a nice distro, one I could have lived with, but I stuck with redhat (and fedora). When 9.1 came out, it was so good I simply had to switch to suse - and have been doing so, on my desktops, and servers.

BTW netcraft shows that in the past month, redhat has lost web server market share and suse, the 2nd distro, has gained ground. I expect the trend to continue.

Groupwise for Linux?

[nlinecomputers]

One of the major week points in Linux is a like of a good groupware application that can compete with Exchange. I just got a copy of Novell's Linux Technical Resource Kit which is a set of free DVDs of some of Novell's Linux products.

I'm looking forward to trying out GroupWise. I was always a fan of it and a Linux based version could bring a good groupware solution to the SOHO market.

Novell Has What Linux Needs

[4of12]

NDS.

You remember, the nice directory service they brought out for Windows years ahead of Active Directory? MS simply vaporware pre-announced that AD would be coming and that spelt the death knell for NDS because anyone with a lot of Windows boxes wanted to make sure they had a "compatible solution" and the only way to guarantee that was to source from a sole supplier that already had them by the short hairs.

Meanwhile, enterprise Linux could use some improvements in convenient, secure, scalable directory services. People testing prototype desktop Linux solutions want to move beyond the /etc/passwd and local home directory stage of life.

As it stands, people managing Linux LANs limp along using NIS, maybe some cobbled together pieces of LDAP with PAM and kerberos.

There's room for an enterprise level solution that could better support Linux LANs in corporate environments that would also play well with Windows boxes needing services.

The NDS code base could be combined with Samba and other open source technologies to provide just that.

Re:Novell Has What Linux Needs

[FauxPasIII]

> maybe some cobbled together pieces of LDAP with PAM and kerberos

Your implication that using LDAP and kerb5 is a rickity, poorly integrated solution is misinformed... once
you have it up and running the system is _beautiful_. The only weak spot is that it's nontrivial to get it
running in the first place, and there aren't as many front-end management tools. Hell, all active directory
is is kerb, LDAP and some flashy deployment tools and management consoles.

Re:Novell Has What Linux Needs

[sloanster]

This is insightful?

Meanwhile, enterprise Linux could use some improvements in convenient, secure, scalable directory services. People testing prototype desktop Linux solutions want to move beyond the /etc/passwd and local home directory stage of life.

Welcome to 1994, Rip Van Winkle! Even back then, we managed quite a few linux, solaris and sgi systems centrally via nis, and with nfs automounted home directories, so that users get their same environment, whether they log in on a sun, sgi or linux box.

Nowdays nis is a bit long in the tooth, and we would use openldap, or novell edirectory as the centralized user data store.

The Real Key

[Exter-C]

The real key about the whole novell thing is its not just about the OS its about the services that run ontop of that OS. Linux is a fairly good platform that is becoming much more recognised as a corporate platform. Idealy with a Linux version they should also look at a *BSD port and really start to push into the UNIX market. I would suspect (and from my own experiences working in IT for over 10years) that most of the Novel customer base (big guys) alreaddy have a unix team managing other systems. This brings the TCO down as the staff are often alreaddy there.

I personally in my corporate roll have been stuck with redhat, personally I use freebsd and slackware but the real issue is that with SuSe emerging out of its european bunker the market has reacted well so far.

Good luck suse/novell..

Gee, Great.

[siphoncolder]

As if they're already not making enough money...

oh no!

[IncarnadineConor]

We had netware at my work when I first got here. It took me ages to pry it out of the fevered grip of my boss. PLEASE DON'T LET THEM GAIN BACK INDUSTRY SUPPORT!

Uhh..

[The AtomicPunk]

Why would we not believe Novell? Didn't they recently purchase the #2 Linux vendor in the world? :)

Novell as Open Source Hero....what you overlook.

[Anonymous Coward]

My how soon you forget.

Novell 'has been a hero' years ago when they came to a settlement in the USL vs BSDI lawsuit, freeing the BSD source tree for anyone to use. The settlement had little to do with 'sticking a finger in Microsoft's eye', whereas Linux support today is all about the eye gouging.

What would be interesting is a 'map' of the managers from back then to now. The points that are common may be the allies.

Additional points to someone who adds a 'map' of the Canopy Group to search for 'common' points - what with their formation of the Linux company Caldera who bought out SCO then renamed themselves to SCO.

Networking...

[Maljin Jolt]

With this enormous experience with networking as comodity, perhaps Novell should made multiplayer games? Like Microsoft.

WTF - SUSE Desktop Registration

[GrumpyDeveloper]

I haven't look at Novell in quite a while and this morning I noticed that they have a free download of SUSE "desktop Linux" available on their site. So, I thought I'd grab a copy since it says "No registration or key is required". The actual download page, however, says:

"Registration is required for the free download of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Personal. You will also be asked to complete a very brief survey."

No thanks, Novell. I think I'll grab my copy here.

Re:WTF - SUSE Desktop Registration

[FuzzyShrimp]

If you think that is bad, you should have been with me reading 2 linear feet of little red Netware 2.15 to 3.0 installation/upgrade books and 40 5.25 inch floppy disks at 2am in the morning. I actually used "poist-it" notes on the floppies to keep everything straight. Arghhh! All the crossreferencing in the world didn't help me because it didn't crossreference properly just like your article stated for the free SUSe "no registration" offer. Oh? Now? Yes, we're up to 6.0 now and loving it.

Re:WTF - SUSE Desktop Registration

[GrumpyDeveloper]

Been there. Done that.

Once upon a time (about 10 years ago), I was a CNE and I can still remember the stacks and stacks of floppies required to install Netware.

Ah, the good old days. Not. :)

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Won't die in the near future. Couple of days back
my rather old hard disk (the only hard disk on that machine) became defective & I had to install a new drive & reinstall XP from scratch. After replacing
the Hard Disk it took me less than an hour to be
up & running (starting from booting through the XP
install DISK & formatting the new drive). This is why I will never move from XP in the near future. Likewise for most Windows Users.

FWIW, I have been using XP from the time it's been released & I have been hit by a virus only once - it took me a few hours to get back to shape then. I have never had a BSOD.

And don't forget...

[Chordonblue]

SuSE Linux. Simply awesome distro for the desktop, and great tools for Windows network connectivity. Smart move on Novell's part to buy this distro.

Novell needs to do the following:

[MtViewGuy]

1. Find a way to live down their past. Alas, for many IT managers the very name Novell still conjures up the once-mighty NetWare and how that has fallen by the wayside as UNIX-based networking has taken over.

2. Novell must do a major marketing push to show they are heavily committed to Linux that not only is aimed at the computer-literate crowd, but also to the general public. After all, one of the reasons why IBM succeeded as a huge user of Linux was not only the over US$1 billion IBM spent to port Linux to run on S/390 and AS/400 big iron hardware, but also the fact IBM did a masterful job of publicizing this fact to non-computer literate types in a series of TV commercials shown worldwide.

Re:Novell needs to do the following:

[Twid]

I agree. Novell made a huge marketing push around NetWare 5 and the "One Net" vision when I (and Schmidt) was there, and it paid off both in sales and the stock price.

Marketing, will Novell ever get it right? :(

Re:Novell needs to do the following:

[sgtrock]

1. Find a way to live down their past. Alas, for many IT managers the very name Novell still conjures up the once-mighty NetWare and how that has fallen by the wayside as UNIX-based networking has taken over.

Live down their past??? So Netware faded away. So? You still have the finest directory service in the world in eDirectory and one of the best sets of tools for desktop management in Zenworks. Novell has consistently created valuable solutions that they have sold to a very large number of very satisfied customers. After all, they still have the cleanest balance sheet in the IT industry. They didn't get that without revenue.

2. Novell must do a major marketing push to show they are heavily committed to Linux that not only is aimed at the computer-literate crowd, but also to the general public. After all, one of the reasons why IBM succeeded as a huge user of Linux was not only the over US$1 billion IBM spent to port Linux to run on S/390 and AS/400 big iron hardware, but also the fact IBM did a masterful job of publicizing this fact to non-computer literate types in a series of TV commercials shown worldwide.

Please. IBM didn't pay for the port to the mainframe. A handful of developers within IBM found out that some enthusiasts within Suse were working on it and clandestinely helped them out. They got it done in less than six months. At that point, they told IBM's management, who were completely blown away. The first $1 billion IBM w spent was almost entirely on marketing. What didn't go there was spent on ramping up skills within their dev groups to port apps and OSes.

Yes, Novell has do a major marketing push. In case you haven't noticed, THEY ARE DOING JUST THAT! It takes TIME to change perceptions. Give them a year or two to get the message out and sell some support contracts, willya?

I've always said...

[Chordonblue]

...As long as there's a Pennsylvania, they'll be a Novell. (tm)

Novell got a bad rep because of it's poor integration with newer Windows environments (namely, when Windows 95 came out). Many of you remember having to use the buggy 16 bit client for those Windows 95 installations until the buggier 32-bit was fixed.

Password integration, stableness of the client, and a host of other factors frustrated admins everywhere. A LOT of places (not so many in PA), went Windows-only just to escape the complexity of running parallel NOS's.

That never should have happened and yes, I do blame Novell for it. They had a full two years to plan, design, and implement the 32-bit client and when Windows 95 came out, adoption was more immediate and widespread than Novell expected. Of course a LOT of companies (Canon, HP, etc.) were 'blindsided' by 95 as well.

Meanwhile MS offered migration tools in Windows NT, and an inferior but completely stable Novell client that offered base network compatibility (although there was no support for NLM-based apps).

This is certainly not to say that Novell's NOS implementation was inferior! Hell no! As integration has gotten better, so has Novell's overall product. And as Linux sneaks it's way in through the back door, Novell makes it possible to more closely integrate these clients with their Windows brethren.

I think as long as Microsoft continues to act like 'Rainman' (as in the scene where he won't board the plane), whenever Linux is mentioned; Novell is going to eat their lunch for them. And rightfully so.

The funny thing is, and I'm still not quite sure why, many Pennsylvanian networks won't have to do anything but upgrade to a new version.

How long can the keep it up?

[emtboy9]

I dont know, but just very simply, I am one of the people who does alpha and beta testing of SuSE/Novell linux, and if what I have seen so far is any indication, they have a LONG way to go before they can honestly claim any top 5 spot.

Admittedly, YaST is a MUCH better installer than it used to be, and it is fine as a system configuration tool as well, but there are just so many little things that dont work right, and too many issues in the release cycle that are just plain annoying. BUT they are definitely getting better. I would almost dismiss most of my beef with them as integration pains as Novell takes the reins.

Oh well, more power to them, I wish them well. We need more major linux players in the distro field (and no, Debian doesnt count, as it is not an enterprise OS).

What linux needs, is a few more Red Hats or SuSEs in the enterprise OS market. Make competition between Distros increase and we will get better underlying OSs, even better development and innovation than we have now, more hardware vendors will start creating drivers, or releasing specs so that OSS developers can create drivers, more companies will take up Linux as their OS of choice, and so on and so forth.

Right now we have a good start, but we really need more to get the momentum going. I would love to see another major player in the field, it would make MS sweat just that much more :)

Moderators: The most important reply so far!!!

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Anyone with mod points: Please mod this guy up.

This is far, far and away the most important reply on this entire thread.

Of course, I'm not exactly sure what it means, and I'm still sitting here contemplating what it might have to say about salesmen and the pointy-headed bosses who purchase from them, but it's a must read for anyone who's curious about why things are the way that they are, and not the way that we think they should be.

PS: You can never overestimate the business in end of things, even in the tech world. For instance, I once read an interview with Thomas Watson Jr, in the WSJ, in the late eighties-early nineties timeframe, when it looked like IBM was about to go bankrupt, and he made the point that he thought it was a huge mistake when IBM moved away from leasing mainframes [which had been his great insight] and into selling mainframes. Oddly enough, with their massive push into "services" and "service contracts" over the last ten years, they've come almost full circle, back to the leasing model.

Re:Moderators: The most important reply so far!!!

[Akimotos]

Basically the situation is even worse .... here in Europe most people's salary is based on the number of people in their team. The bigger the number, the bigger their salary.
So, if your salary is based on your team of 9 people that service 35 servers and 120 desktops, why would you start thinking of an alternative situation in which you can do the same with 4 people or even less .... in most situations you end up ripping off yourself ....
I know this is a terribly message, but right now a lot of those such called IT managers are being paid because they waste money.
Hardly anyone gets fired on overspending on MS based solutions including overpriced maintenance. Hardly anyone gets rewarded for picking a cheaper solution that gives someone more uptime and productivity.
I have a customer running 4000 servers. Most of them MS stuff, some Unix (RS 6000), some Linux, some solaris and -yes- a few Netware. If we talk about platform with the IT director, he is always talking about MS, MS, MS ... while the average uptime of those w2k servers is barely 100 days. On the other hand, the Novell servers have an average uptime of 970 days. They even run an old 3.2 machine with an uptime of over 1500 days!
Can you imagine that the day is coming on which the IT manager involved is being rewarded for the fact that he finally got rid of that old Novell stuff.... (I think here in Holland I pay 1.5% taxes just to pay for all that MS crap).

Developers Developers Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Novell is headed in the right direction. Because of the limited ability of their previous server software versions, they lost out in a lot of areas due to the lack of functional software. I signed up on Novell's developer site and got the documentation for the API, only to find out that there is pretty much nothing for use on the server side; All of it's client-side, which means you're limited to two platforms and only things safe to do on those machines. It didn't help that the rest of the world was TCP/IP either.

Getting development tools and documentation used to be a hassle for Netware, too. They were one of the only companies to sell an operating system, but offer no native compiler, either for free or for sale.

--
Fred

#2 vendor, in who's books?

[Blitzenn]

I can't find anything what even remotely suggests that novell has surpassed other big vendors. Even Linux world is quoted as stating that Debian, Mandrakesoft, Red Hat, and SUSE are the top four vendors as of April 4th of this year. Here is that link Linux and Security: Forrester Report Flawed, Say Four Top Vendors. Perhaps you could provide a link to support your ridiculous claim that novell is that good at anything anymore?

Re:#2 vendor, in who's books?

[terrencefw]

Oh this is just toooo funny! RTFA, troll. Novell just bought SuSE, so they're now a big Linux vendor.

Re:#2 vendor, in who's books?

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell owns SUSE, so I'm guessing that makes them #2.

I don't have a link to back up the claim that SUSE is #2. I'm surprised IBM isn't #2, actually. Since IBM doesn't have distro of their own, I guess they don't count?

Re:#2 vendor, in who's books?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you could provide a link to support your ridiculous claim that novell is that good at anything anymore?

There is no link that can support a statement of, "is Novell good at anything anymore", but I gather from your comment, you've never been close to a Netware server, let alone used one for anything important.

Look at some of the posts above, and read what some people actually in enterprise environments have to say about Novell. Running a web server out of your basement is not the same as having to support hundreds, hell, thousands of users. Netware is good at what it does, regardless of the market share numbers.

Marketing Novell as a Linux company is beyond the point. That's the easy part. Getting a unified product line that works and getting the developers is the hard part. The only reason Novell is going with Linux is the 3rd party developers, not because the Linux kernel has any sort of technical advantage over the Netware kernel(none that have been discussed at any length anyway). Marketing is something you use to pull the wool over a clueless manager's eyes, not something that should woo a "technically sound" decision maker.

I want to see Novell succeed, and I wouldn't care if it was using its proprietary products, Linux, or one of the BSDs. The fact is, they make a pretty good product. They make a pretty good product that is technically superior to Microsoft's offerings and everything you can find in the free software world in terms of what Netware focuses on. It's just the lack of 3rd party support, free or otherwise which is the real issue. It's the reason they lost that market share in the first place, not because of their products in and of themselves.

Re:#2 vendor, in who's books?

[Blitzenn]

I never meant to suggest that Novell's past products were not good. I don't recall ever mentioning Novell's web server nor what I did for a living. I don't see how that enters into the arguement.

Re:#2 vendor, in who's books?

[Blitzenn]

Oh, and just because they bought SUSE does not make Novell the second largest. Are you taking SUSE off the list? SUSE remains where it is, Novell just owns them. They don't inherit SUSE's accomplishments, they remain SUSE's along with their titles.

Suse 9.1

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about anyone else but I recently installed Suse 9.1 and it is awesome, Windowmaker menus even update when new programs are installed. Yast and SAX2 are by far the best configuration utilities ive ever seen on Linux. It is definently my new distribution of choice, besting even Gentoo.

Re:Suse 9.1

[pandrijeczko]

SuSE is probably the best all-round "out-of-box" Linux distribution IMHO but I think it's unfair to make direct comparisons with Gentoo.

People, like me, that use Gentoo do so because we want a high degree of customisation and system optimisation and, in the longer term, because upgrading involves emerging applications on a reasonably regular basis as opposed to doing a complete upgrade when a new boxed distro is released.

It's just a matter of requirements and there's room for both type of Linux user in the world.

In the Shade

[tarsi210]

Here's how I see it: Novell, having locked up the LAN market years ago, has since retired to the poolside patio. Only recently has it put down its Cosmo, set down its martini, glanced over its shades, and noticed that the sun has gone down. Now it's jumping into the Linux pool (where Microsoft has peed in the shallow end), realized that it has forgotten how to swim, can't tread water, and its water wings are still back in the cupboard.

Good on ya, Novell, for attempting to jump into the middle of things, but you need to focus first on revamping your marketing and business strategy departments; otherwise, you would not have lost so much ground in the server room. Realize your excellent assests but don't rely on them; understand your business but don't count on it; acknowledge your competitors but don't give them slack. Take those things to court on this Linux deal and you might have a shot. Good luck.

Re:In the Shade

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite right...

Novell locked up then LOST the LAN market years ago and has been desperately casting about to try to stay alive. This is merely their latest desperate grasp at trying to stay alive.

Many desperate companies have tried to leap into OSS as of late. It's become a favorite dumping ground of out of date tech.

But who is their community?

[msurman]

>They are really pushing the linux message, and are
>more free software (in beer and freedom) than the
>pre-Novell SuSE was

This is totally true and has won me over to SUSE, but .... ... they are really failing in terms of figuring out who the constituency for their pro-Free campaign is. Is it hardcore geeks? No, they have Debian, etc. Is to corporate leaders? No, they just want stuff that works.

My sense is that, with Ximian and SUSE, Novell has the chance to organize the previously unorganized cadre of Free / Open Source supporters amongst designers, usability people, technology strategists, management consultants -- people who advise on and play with tech but don't see themselves as command line people. If organized, these folks could be a huge new wave of Free / Open evangelists ... and supporters for Novell.

The sad thing is that the marketing strategy coming out of Novell seems to be ignoring this segment altogether ... and trashing the potential of the hipper Ximian / SUSE brands to reach them. The Ximian site is gone altogether now. The SUSE site is mostly just sales and support. And the Novell site is all startched shirts and no real info ... certainly no community.

I think Novell has a real chance here, but just playing to the conservative side of the corporate market is not enough. It needs to use its 'free' (GPLing) approach and extend it into the realm of community building.

- MS

Ummm...

[leonbrooks]

...dunno how to break this to you... Linus still runs around in shorts.

MySQL and Novell

[stryck9]

Novell is going to buy MySQL. Expect something @ around LinuxWorld.

Re:MySQL and Novell

[PaulusMagnus]

Novell is going to buy MySQL.

I hope not. Novell are an excellent networking company, not a database design specialist. MySQL has done very well all by itself and I would fear that Novell's involvement would help to kill it, rather than let it carry on building its own market share.

I think MySQL is part of any corporate strategy for anybody seriously considering an OSS/Linux setup. MySQL is the natural replacement for large, expensive Oracle installations as well as Microsoft's offering that is really just a workgroup database server. However, they don't need to buy it. I would have thought that Novell's purchase of other systems such as the Borland/WordPerfect suite years ago might have taught them to stick to what they do best.

Re:MySQL and Novell

[stryck9]

Sigh... its gonna happen, whether we like or not.

Speech, not beer.

[Anonymous Coward]

No comment required.

Didn't RedHat try this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't RedHat change their name to Fedora?

Insiders Buy In big

[Anonymous Coward]

In the wall street journal today there was an article about how Novell insiders have been buying in big since june. It also mentioned that so far insiders have accurately predicted the companies value.

Why was novell successful in the first place.

[rayk_sland]

The only reason I ever recommended novell to customers back in the mists of time was that they had a smaller dos memory footprint. The beauty and glory of NDS was lost on me and my small business customers. It only shines at the enterprise level. nt was easier to use and when 95/98/xp became the desktop, the memory footprint was less and less of an issue. Now their fancy dancy client is huge and terrifically unlovely. What they should have done was jump on the 'smb' bandwagon and undercut nt server pricewise. But now samba is here and novell is out of luck. Simple is easier to manage for most people, ultimately.

That's not correct

[bogie]

" They have something RedHat don't, sales offices world wide."

From Red Hat's webpage they have offices in

Africa | Austria | Belgium | Denmark | Eastern Europe | England | Finland | France | Germany | Ireland | Italy | Luxembourg | Middle East | The Netherlands | Norway | Portugal | Spain | Sweden | Switzerland

Australia | India | Singapore

and finally Japan | Greater China | Korea

Is that world wide enough?

Anyway I will give Novell credit for having greater reach in the VAR area because they've simply been doing the whole channel thing forever. But that doesn't change the fact that once NT 4.0 came out Novell went into a massive nosedive that hasn't really stopped yet. When I realized they were doing the whole linux thing I honestly didn't think it was the greatest idea, but seeing what they've done so far I'm starting to turn around and interested to see if Novell can use its marketing power to gain back many of those clients who fled Netware for NT years ago.

Novell spending "too much energy" fighting SCO

[sneakers563]

I love Laura DiDio - like the Iraqi information minister, no matter what happens she stays on message. Novell is spending too much energy fighting the SCO lawsuit? Well gee, it only affects the future viability of their business plan. Why spend energy on that? On second thought, maybe this means Ms. DiDio has finally realized that there is nothing to the SCO suit after all. Why spend energy on something so obviously baseless? Naw, she's just a shill. Keep plugging away Ms. DiDio...

Marketing? What's Marketing?

[gwgoddess]

I too have been a CNE since v3 and a current MCNE in Messaging. One thing has been very clear since I first heard the name Novell - They have no effective marketing. They never have and if they don't get their act together, SUSE Linux will die on the vine as Netware is doing. Anybody remember (as I do with amusement) at the marketing "plan" called DENIM announced at Brainshare 2000? Remember when you first got your CNE and you were instantly added to Novell's Marketing database and received advertisements about how cost effective and wonderful Novell products were. No kidding! They were marketing to the people that already believed in Novell enough to bother getting their certifications. Oh yeah, that's money well spent.

Novell's E-mail potential

[soren42]

That's only given the Ximian Evolution side of the equation. Don't forget that with the SuSE acquistion, there's a powerful opportunity to integrate with SuSE Linux OpenExchange, and provide a front-to-back e-mail solution that is MS Exchange compatible - with the overt virus concerns that comes from the MS implementation.

That would be a powerful combination that I'd love to see from Novell.

MODERATORS ON CRACK

[Anonymous Coward]

this was the first reply to the above post but the fucking shitty-ass moderators decided to weild their slap-stick and slap this +5 informative post.

WHOEVER MOD'D -1 OVERRATED IS A PEICE OF SHIT

But Win3.11/Netware networks still exist

[DABANSHEE]

It's amazing how many Netware/Win3.11 networks are still arround, I come across em all the time & in the strangest of places too.

When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?

[Anonymous Coward]

For Novell, and for Red Hat to succeed, the answer to the question really needs to be "business solutions." Not Linux, not Mono, but solutions. To most of this community, IBM means Big Company embracing Linux. But most of this community sees IBM through narrow, Linux-filtered blinders. Linux is not what turned IBM around in the mid '90's when its stock dropped by about half and it seemed to be on the way out the door. What turned IBM around was focusing on providing, and being known for, business solutions. It is my understanding that IBM's custom software solutions are the largest, most profitable part of its business. Likewise, Novell needs to be seen by its customers not as a Linux company, nor a Network company, nor an open source company but a solutions company.

By making use of open source software, they can't charge for the software, but can charge for the time to customize, and to support it, much as IBM charges for it's customized business solutions. Companies won't go to them for open source, but for software solutions customized to their business's specific needs. The ability to provide specific solutions is what makes IBM very profitable, and what will make Novell profitable if, and this is a big if, they can change their own and their customers' perceptions.

help plz.

[xmorg]

Were can I download the novell linux distro plz. Thanks.

Re:Gentoo

[yuri benjamin]

So, what I would like to know, from all you Gentoo users (since I am considering Gentoo to replace Mandrake 9.1):

How easy is Gentoo to maintain? Does it have a control panel type app? Does it have something like Mdk's HardDrake?

At home I will only ever have dial-up, until rural New Zealand gets broadband. This will somewhat hamper "emerge kde" :-(
However, the internet cafe near my work will allow me to bring in my own laptop, so I can plug it in there and emerge at will, which brings me to my next question:

If I emerge some package on the laptop while plugged into someone else's broadband, how easily can I then transfer those packages from the laptop to other boxen on the home LAN?

The laptop is a 2GHz P4. The other PCs are old cast-offs, so the laptop will do any compiling with distcc for the slower machines. How hard is this?

Thanks
Yuri

Re:Gentoo

[jobsagoodun]

Much as I like it, I wouldn't like to run Gentoo on dial-up. But to answer your questions Its easy to maintain, but mainly with vi! /etc/ has a much much nicer layout than other distros I've used though. You _could_ transfer the source packages as portage keeps them all in a directory you specify in make.conf, but I guess you might have slightly different requirements on the other PC's which would make it want to download other stuff from the internet - perhaps you want to look at a regular distro plus that automake thingy that was on slashdot a few weeks ago that looked a bit like 'portage for other distros'.

OT

[Derf the]

Yuri your home page is 404'ing.

Re:OT

[yuri benjamin]

Yes, I cancelled it.

Re:Gentoo

[binary paladin]

There is no control panel app that I'm aware of. I edit /etc files to set stuff up unless the given program has its own manager. Although emerge -Up world is REALLY nice. Suddenly, an entirely updated machine. (This is, of course, assuming you're a freak like that... which I am.)

When you use emerge to compile a package you can have it make binary packages. Right now I do all the compiling on my desktop and then have my laptop use those packages (since it's much slower).

However, you can simple copy /usr/portage/distfiles from one machine to another. That's where the source tarballs are stored. So you could go, do some emerge (and I think there's an option to only grab the sources, I believe it is --fetchonly) at the cafe and then bring those files back for compiling.

Distcc, AFAIK is easy to set up although, as I said before, I prefer to compile binary packages on my fastest machine and use those for installing. (This is especially convenient since I almost always use my laptop anyway.) I complile i686 because I'm really not too interested in the extra 1% performance I might gain by compiling specifically P3 or Athlon (and my home machines are different architectures).

Anyway... that may or may not have been helpful. If you're interested in more info you can reach me at smilingbandit AT neo-anarchists.com