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Novell to Help Port Applications to Linux
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting that: "Novell announced the program at its European BrainShare 2004 tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain." "Under the initiative, leading software and hardware vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and Scali Inc. will work with Novell help their software partners deploy their platforms and solutions on SUSE Linux, according to Novell Inc."
I have not read the FA, but I do hope they port applications to the LSB rather than just to their distro.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Have you used it lately? I resembles Outlook now.
There are already server and clients of GroupWise 6.5 available for Linux. We have GroupWise as our e-mail system here and wouldn't even think about running anything else.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
First, let's correct your previous statement. Novell and SuSE are one, and so there's not as much for a developer to struggle to conform to. Second, as was announced on /., the WSJ, and several other sources a few days ago, IBM, Novell, HP, and several other very major vendors all announced support of LSB-2. Whether they're posting placards and advertising everywhere or not, if I'm a developer for Linux tools, I'm going to code to LSB-2 spec, not to a platform (RH/SuSE/FC/LM/etc.)
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
One of the good things going for LSB is that HP, and IBM support it. Its in THEIR best interest to have a standards base because it makes their support job easier. While Suse or Redhat might only care about supporting their specific customers, each of them being different makes the support job tougher for major system vendors. My guess is that HP and IBM pressuring the linux companies will make them pretty compliant on the LSB front and force the linux vendors to differentiate on additional features that don't break the LSB.
>>"Under the initiative, leading software and hardware vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and Scali Inc. will work with Novell help their software partners deploy their platforms and solutions on SUSE Linux, according to Novell Inc."
What partners?
It was in the application space that Novell lost it's market and mindshare to Microsoft.
I don't think it's bad either way, just curious as to how it's going to shake out. Any Linux usage is good in my book. More apps available is very good. More alternatives to the bloated wares of Castle Redmondore, priceless.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Some might not have noticed, but it seems to be the first topic with the "N" logo from Novell. I don't like the company in particular, but you to admit that Novell is betting high on Linux and open source - although they are not abandoning their closed source software like Zenworks, a strategye they call "shared source".
How about a good working alternative to Outlook. Does Ximian natively do the e-mail and calendaring, and keep the message store on the exchange server?
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Because of the GPL, it's not possible for there to be a "'Microsoft' of Linux." Microsoft dominates with proprietary and non-standards-compliant software, which can't happen with Linux because anyone can copy it.
Yes, people can be upset when a poor technology <cough>RPM</cough> dominates, but they can't be forced to use it. The only possible issue is software patents as a lock-in mechanism, and I don't think anyone would put up with Novell trying use that -- they'd just switch. They'd have to already be locked in first.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This is particularly important for companies like Novell who are targeting corporate customers, most of whom run tailored software for their business purposes (as well as the office stuff for their admin, and other general purpose software).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Welcome to vendor lock. That's exactly the way MS wanted it to be. Congratulations you are unable to switch to a lower cost alternative!.
It's like those monkey traps you hear about. You know where you make a hole in the box just big enough for the monkey to put his hand in and grab a fist full of peanuts. The problem is that once the fist is full of peanuts the monkey can't get his hand out. So he sits there until the hunter comes by, trapped by his unwillingness to let go a handful of peanuts.
evil is as evil does
I don't believe that this is necessarily a valid argument anymore. Abiword will open Word documents, Gnumeric will open excel documents, and openoffice will of course open both. You may lose some formatting and/or images, but many files will open correctly in these free softwares. You can even convert your word documents using wvWare, another free piece of software.
Do you have to edit them, or are they read-only? If they are read-only, you might want to try "wvPDF" and a small script (for f in find / -name \*.doc ; do wvPDF $f $(basename $f .doc).pdf ; done)
Note the script is not tested, but it shouldn't do anything *too* bad to your originals...
Alternatively, if you would like to edit the files later, try wvLatex (then edit using Lyx later), wvDVI, wvAbw (edit using abiword), wvRTF (edit using openoffice), or to just extract the text use wvText. Or you can do a combination of a number of them (generate the pdf and the RTF source, for example). No guarantees, YMMV, IANAL, etc etc etc, but for the 1/2 hour it take to get it all running, it may well be worth your time.
From the bits and pieces of news and info that I know of wxWindows, porting a MFC app to wxWindows (cross platform) is 98% of the time just a matter of search and replace.
So technically there is no excuse, however they were responding to a QT framework question.
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.
I'd love to know how this "porting and migration center" is going to deal with all the desktop software that isn't as easy to port as UNIX server software is. It's not even like OpenOffice can deal with all MS Office documents, in particular the ones where people abuse Excel as a database, have MS Access databases lying around, write VBScript apps in Word etc.