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Open Source Advocate VP Chris Stone Leaves Novell
SafeTinspector writes "ComputerWorld has a story regarding the sudden departure of Chris Stone, a respected open source advocate and the man often sited as the architect behind Novell's acquisistion of Ximian and SUSE as well as the recent open source orientation of Novell.
At the same time, Novell has a web site dedicated to dispelling the mistruths propogated in Microsoft's 'Get the Facts' campaign. What does all this mean to the future of Novell's Linux and Open Source strategy? Does any of this relate to the imminent release of Open Enterprise Server? Anybody?"
At the same time, Novell has a web site dedicated to dispelling the mistruths propogated in Microsoft's 'Get the Facts' campaign. What does all this mean to the future of Novell's Linux and Open Source strategy? Does any of this relate to the imminent release of Open Enterprise Server? Anybody?"
Novell's actions over the past year has really helped them gain some 'political capital' with me, and I believe the rest of the community. I really want to believe that they will keep making the right decisions, and they will keep working with the OpenSource Community.
For example, I've been running RedHat servers for the past 6 years. I am happy with RedHat, even through a few problems here and there. But I'm planning to move toward Suse, because I'm so impressed with Novell's recent work.
They can really change that momentum with the community quickly, by making the wrong decisions. So I really really hope this doesn't mean a change in what they plan to do in the future.
Brandon Petersen
Get FireFox!
I can't post this with my real UID as it could jeapordize my job. Stone is coming here to Microsoft. They apparently offered him a big bucket of cash to undo the good he's done for the Linux community (and OSS in general)
This offer came straight from Ballmer. In Redmond it's viewed as a coup but a few of us younger ones think it's grasping at straws as the server division is taking a severe beating from management with their shoddy product.
Watch, you will see that headline next week in an announcement at the MS Developer Conference.
Since being aquired, I've heard nothing about Evolution. What gives?
He may have been told where the door was. http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?News ID=2564
Too bad.
The Evolution will not be televised.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I mean, all I want to do is bind to my god damned LDAP tree using SASL. Is that so much to ask? You can connect to IMAP servers using SASL mechanisms with Evolution, so what gives with LDAP?
"Devlopers! Devlopers! Chris Stone! Devlopers!..."
Get help somewhere.
tr.v. sited, siting, sites
To situate or locate on a site: sited the power plant by the river.
tr.v. cited, citing, cites
To quote as an authority or example.
Do it now, before it's too late.
No, Vern. They just let him in.
http://www.reuters.com/financeNewsArticle.jhtml?t
"Mr. Stone was instrumental in pushing Novell toward a strategy of capturing value from open-source software, as opposed to other members of management maybe more inclined toward giving away Linux to fuel demand for [Novell's] other offerings" As a potential user, and not a stockholder, his leaving doesn't sound like bad news. He pushed a Red Hat-like strategy vs IBM style strategy? "Respected open-source advocate?" Sounds like he was a businessman making business decisions.
Novell is a large company. Not as large as MS (few are!) but not some little two person shop either. That one person left, even from a senior position, does not mean the sky is falling.
Internal politics, didn't like the traffic in Waltham (where Novell is now HQ'd), really did leave to "pursue other opportunities", doesn't matter. The company has set a course, invested considerable resources, indeed likely staked it's future on this: No one person leaving is going to have a huge effect.
As much as folks invest in the cult of personality Linux wouldn't come to a screeching halt without Torvalds, MS wouldn't suddenly shut down sans Gates or Ballmer, Apple would still soldier on absent Jobs, etc. Sure there may be different nuances but honestly, does anyone seriously expect the loss of a VP to completely change over a company?
Novell has reinvented itself as a Linux shop. They've expended huge amounts of effort, plus their dwindling capitol, on making this transition. They've promised their investors, sold their customers, rearranged their products and development. While it's unfortunate Stone is leaving there is no shortage of folks ready to step into his position (heck, he's stepped in & out of it several times!)
My take-away from this? There is a heatlthy enterprise Linux market with employment opportunities for tech managers on the vendor-end. Right now I bet there are more then a few resumes beiong spiffed up at IBM, Red Hat, and even MS (SCO need not apply.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Chris Rock is 2005 Oscar host
Will this mean there won`t be any GNovell Linux and KDE will remain the main desktop in Suse!!
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?New
Even just reading the article, it sounds, at best, Stone was a "fan" or "enthusiast" not an "advocate." It doesn't hurt to remember that its flaky idealists who championed and continue to advocate opensource/free software. Its nice to have mainstream business understand the benefits, but these guys have different agendas- its "Evolution", not "Revolution," after all.
Could the MS product Windows Services for Unix (3.5 OpenBSD based) and SCO Group be involved with Stone's alleged arrival at Redmond's door as well?
This is a hoax and many has pointed it out. But I'll point out another reason why it is a hoax.
He says he can't post using his real UID because it would jeopardize his job. Then he says that he is "coming _here_ to Microsoft".
If he was concerned about his job he would not have given an indication that he worked for MS, nor would he point out that he posts anonymously because he is at risk.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
wasnt too bad since microsoft seemed fit to rip it off and call it active directory
I worked with Chris Stone at his startup company tilion. I was never really impressed by Stone and here's why.
We spent 2 years putting together a fancy XML based web application for inventory tracking at Stone's Tilion web startup company in Maynard. We went, burned, through about 26 million. The sales people couldn't sell the Tilion product at all. Nobody wanted it. Stone desperately tried to retool the product several times by adding in other third party software. We just ended up spending more money on a more expensive product that still nobody wanted! Eventually the investors showed up one day and pulled the plug on the company.
I followed his path for awhile after he left Tilion for Novell. He seemed to be doing the exact same thing he did at Tilion his failed startup: buying up third party software and mashing it all together. My guess is the same exact thing happened at Novell which happened at Tilion: a lot of money was spent and sales didn't increase -- a practice which is discouraged in the corporate world.
In conclusion, lately I have been seeing Stone as the Al Gore of software executives. Just because he claims to have 'invented' CORBA doesn't necessarily mean he is a good business leader. He is a decent guy but just not a great leader.
...was that Chris got a multi-million dollar (cash) and tons of stock as a parting gift. My, and some people say you can't make money with Open Source software! The executives are cleaning up.
Or right.
emt 377 emt 4
Is "mistruths" even a word? Dictionary.com doesn't think so.
*insert a rant about writing clearly here.*
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This reminds me of when Richard Garriott left Ultima Online...As I recall there was some controversy as to how voluntary his departure in that situation was, as well. I think it's completely safe to say also that UO was never the same afterwards...although from memory Garriott's involvement had only been sporadic for about a year before he finally left. UO has been going down hill for a long time, though...it's why the freeshard scene is as big as it is. Really pissed me off when I read EA's TOS for the Sims Online, specifically prohibiting freeshards. Makes me wish I could write to the company and say to them that if they weren't such utterly mindless, incompetent, creatively-devoid, cash-fixated drones, they might have been able to run UO's official shards in a half-intelligent manner...which would have meant that people wouldn't have had any REASON to start their own shards. Running an MMORPG is no small feat...I'm sure many of the people running indie shards now would glady have not bothered if EA's shards were still worth playing. Of course now that I think about it...it most likely isn't the live team's fault...they've most probably got marketing idiots tying their hands about what they can and can't do. To me, associating marketing people with the live team of an MMORPG is like what Sun Tzu said about needing to keep a king away from a general during a war. The king might have authority, but in many cases was utterly clueless about warfare in particular.
;)) Contrary to an earlier post on this topic, I believe that given an individual in question being sufficiently creative/instrumental, the loss of a single person *can* be a big deal to a project. People have a tendency to develop their own logical frameworks, which others can have a very difficult time understanding. You take away the frame of mind and emotion that was responsible for the inception of a project, and there are going to be ramifications, even if said project continues.
(Now back to the topic
It will be interesting to see how much of a course change results in Chris Stone's having left Novell. If it's true that SUSE are starting to take over the company, I can't see that as being a good thing...I will admit I don't know all that much about SUSE as a company, but virtually all of what I have read about their attitude I haven't liked...especially the debacle about YaST before Novell decided to open it.
Time to be pedantic: eDirectory is the product MS 'borrowed' from for AD, Netware is one of many OSs that eDir can sit upon.
Personally, I find Novell's new direction very exciting. You can already run eDir on Netware, Linux, Windows, Solaris and a couple of other *nixes but it didn't integrate too well. The addition of NSS, NDPS and other bits currently only on Netware is going to menan you can build a scalable, resiliant system offering File, Print and web services using practically any hardware, as long as it runs SuSE. Its exciting stuff!
OK, one more time: Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. What he claimed the credit for is taking the political/legislative initiative that facilitated the emergence of the (commercial) internet as we know it. This guy did a lot of leg work behind the curtain to set the internet free, to unleash it onto the public.
He saw the potential of the internet at all sorts of levels way before many saw it. Don't let a badly worded claim distort what he really did. A lot of us should be grateful to him for being a politician that "gets it".
...when CowboyNeal spends too much time on making sure /. pages are valid html!
often cited as
In my company when a top executive or manager leaves suddenly it's not always a performance or political issue. On more than one occasion it's been because the manager was caught boinking a directly-reporting employee. My point is the public doesn't (and possibly won't) know the details. As such the better question to ask is, how will Novell do without him? If one company relies so heavily on one executive, then the company may not be all that stable to begin with.
Instead of speculating wildly about all the myriad of bizzare reasons that Chris Stone might have possibly left novell/been replaced by a pod person why don't you just ask Chris Stone why he left?
Mayby some view working in buisness the same way you build boats, or hobbies.
Once youve fixed up one nice old boat (Novell), its a job well done. Time to seek another fixer upper boat! Or even build your own from scratch!
>I can't post this with my real UID as it could jeapordize my job.
As you posted this in the afternoon (15:39), you probably did that from your office, which in turn means they can easily (and that's an understatement) find you in their proxy or firewall logs.
Good luck anyway!
Time to be pedantic: eDirectory is the product MS 'borrowed' from for AD
Hmm, if we are being pedantic, I would say that NDS/eDir is the product MS tried to copy. Some would say thay failed. I couldn't possibley comment ;-)
Microsoft Linux 2005, predicted this 5 years ago.
Microsoft is going to skunk works linux...
After claiming they want to move to a more Service oriented model, Novell has lost (will lose, has it come out yet?) their VP of Worldwide Services, Bob Couture. Now they lose Chris Stone and the issue has reportedly has something to do with his management style with regards to their Open Source developers.
There is a culture war underway between the products side of the house and the services side. This is the beginning of much restructuring at the big red N house...
I am the owner of a small open-source driven business. I will tell you that business is all about capturing value in any way you can. Indeed, both IBM and RedHat have value-capturing strategies (they do this differnetly, btw).
RedHat's strategy has been to capture value by allowing free redistribution of all the software on their distributions and then sell support services. I.e. they give away free beer for their other offerings. RHEL is indeed more a package of services than a package of software.
My business is intending to push a strategy in helping customers migrate to Linux which is somewhat similar to that of Red Hat and Novell-- i.e. promote Free Software in general and work towards supported configurations, but we will not release our own distro (there are enough out there at the moment for us to work with).
Lets face it, to be successful in business you have to deliver value (yes, MS does this too), and you have to either generate or capture that value from somewhere. Open source is a difficult way to generate value but an easy way to capture it by leveraging community.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Over the years, Novell has had just four CEOs. I can't count the number of vice presidents/vice somethings they've hired that had intentions of ruling the Novell world. They read like the who's who in business.
The acquisitions were pretty good, although Novell's not known for integrating their acquisitions very well-- if at all given they let Unix slip from their fingers at a crucial time.
Novell has one of the strictest hierarchies in the business world. That hasn't changed, and likely never will until they're acquired. It's their corporate culture-- embedded by Ray Noorda-- still another guy that tried to face down Bill Gates and lost. So, Stone's departure isn't any news; it was simply a matter of how long Chris could survive there.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I'd be willing to bet it's a personality / managment thing. I can think of two possibilities - either he was blamed for the slip in the OES ship date, or he didn't want the ship date to slip and was overruled.
Give that it's more important for OES to work than be on time, I'm betting on the latter. Insisting that something get done doesn't mean it can be done right in the aomount of time. Novell has to *prove* it can offer the full range of Netware services on a Linux platform. Trust me, if you're an enterprise customer that's used to those services, you're not going to be willing to give them up on short notice. You're not even going to be willing to spend the cash ripping the old Novell client off your workstations -- Novell wasn't sure they wanted to support the NCP (over IP, not IPX) client connecting to Linux/OES systems originally. Their customer studies convinced them they had to.
The biggest problem I still see with Novell is that they don't understand the desktop.
.deb packages? Last I looked at it, it was a manual install.
There isn't a Linux client that will run the login scripts or allow me to use NDPS on a Linux workstation the same as on a Windows workstation.
Novell needs to focus on the CONNECTIONS.
They're rolling out GroupWise on Linux, but there isn't a GroupWise CLIENT for Linux that has the functionality of the Windows client. Come on! You have all of the code available. This should have been done just after you bought SuSE.
ZEN works great on Windows boxes, but not on Linux workstations. Again, you have all the code.
eDirectory is great, but of limited use on Linux boxes and troublesome to install. Where are the
And so on. I'm still convinced that Novell should have skipped buying SuSE and, instead, dumped $1million into funding development on the missing parts of their product line.
OK, so Novell bought Ximian and SuSE. Both of which I have avoided in the past due to what I felt was an overly aggressive attempt to reach into my pocket. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but after using Linux and other FOSS since "Linux Unleashed" was published in '95 I did find it slightly distasteful. These two acquisitions indicated to me that Novell might become a progressive Linux vendor and supporter of open source software. Of course I realized that these buyouts aren't altruistic in nature - Novell certainly wants to use the two products to drive their Identity Management tools, and to use them as wedges to gain further entree into the enterprise Linux domain. That's all fine and dandy - I've heard this vendor lock-in siren song many times before and haven't got up to dance (nor have most of my clients). However, I was optimistic when Novell said it would open source YAST, and then the Ximian Exchange Connector. Maybe they get (some of it) after all. Time will tell. A previous poster insightfully characterized Novell's historical business strategy as schizophrenic. In the long run this might be just an episodic dalliance. In any case Novell can do us all one monumental service and pursue the contested copyrights issue to a definitive and successful outcome of an completely unencumbered kernel. That alone would probably drive more new business for them than they could imagine, and would garner the gratitude of millions of Linux users. They might even convert some cynical old Slackware users.
Sounds like computerworld really needed a story honestly. An employee leaving doesn't always mean because they diss the company.. In fact, if you read the article, they dont even interview him to get the facts straight.
Sadly, I hope this form of media reports, based on jumping to conclusions isn't the future of journelism
Long ago my favorite word processor was WordPerfect. (I still have a copy of WP8 linux running on my systems, though I've gone to OO.) Then Novell bought WP and made one of the worst versions ever, evntually dumping it off to Corel. Coincidentally the market share took a plunge (also due to M$ predatory practices!).
This gives me pause as Novell now owns one of my favorite distros.
seems it's become an open source black hole... sucking up everything it thinks it can commercialize
All the torrents you could want.
Maybe Stone can join OSDL in Oregon
and work with Linus to propel Linux.
Brazilian??? Ximian is from Massachusetts!!! Nat is American and Miguel de Icaza is Mexican, I don't know where you got the Brazilian connection.
And just for the record, the are tons of German companies owned by American ones.
No matter where they're based, what have we heard from Ximian since they were purchased? Aside from the occasional talk about connector Ximian is all but dead in the press. The only press one sees anymore is related to Evolution, and even that's not so hot. Once upon a time there were almost weekly Ximian headlines, now where is it? They bought Suse two releases ago and they still don't even ship it with a proper gnome desktop, much less a full featured gnome/ximian/mono desktop.
Thank god it's GPL so Novell can't kill the project entirely.
My buddy Jay just hooked up with his daughter. Booyakasha.
I don't know where you studied linguistics (what!? you didn't?!) No!!!), but English is one of the least consistent languages you're likely to run across. Genetically, it comes from the Germanic branch of the language tree, but then departs wildly from its roots.
About 1/3 of the words in English are derived from French, having been absorbed into the language in the centuries after the Norman Conquest.
Still later, a lot of Latin was artificially injected into the language because Latin was perceived as superior. Quite a few words of Greek derivation came into the language during this same era.
Other words have been absorbed more recently from Italian, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and, no doubt, others.
Ask any non-native speaker of English about all the inconsistencies and special cases that have to be just memorized. There are many. Probably more than in any other language.
I am a native English speaker. I speak one other language well, and bits of a third. Those other two languages are both far more consistent than English.
Oh, did I mention the huge disconnect between pronunciation and orthography? It stems in large part (but not wholly) from the Great Vowel Shift and the fact that there has never been a central governing authority over English to help move it all in one direction. Of course, that situation got even worse after:
1) The British established far-flung colonies all over the world;
2) Most of the ones in North America struck out to start their own country and began diverging linguistically from Britain.
Now, of course, it's far too late to try and impose any order on the language by fiat.
Today, English is spoken all over the world, as a native language, as a pidgin or creole, and in countless dialects. There are more than a few dialects of English that, despite their status as such, are not very mutually intelligible (at least in speaking), to the point where monolingual speakers of those dialects could probably not communicate with each other unless they resorted to writing down what they wanted to get across.
English is not at all a consistent language - indeed, it would take hundreds of years to impose consistency, if such a thing were possible - so it is ridiculous to state that a president could mess up our linguistic consistency at all, let alone in just four years. Moreover, all the U.S. Presidents of my lifetime - Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II - spoke English differently from one another. John Kerry, if he had won, would have spoken again differently than his predecessors (a bit like Kennedy, although Kerry doesn't seem to have much of a Boston accent), so which one out of all those, if any, would you say was the "linguistically consistent" one?
Among the attempts to give the communications world a sensible application-layer infrastructure, I count CORBA as one of the most spectacular failures - an overcomplex, underspecified monster that still has thousands of engineers trapped in its intricacies.
It takes a special kind of mind to love CORBA.
Darl McBride used to complain a lot that his old friends in Novell had left and thus he had the rug pulled out from under him. Stone wrote several letters, in effect, telling Darl to bugger off when he tried to get Novell on his side at the start of the IBM litigation.
I wonder how this affects that?
Damn straight it will "fulfill every GW user needs" because people are going to dump GroupWise. If there are no GroupWise users, then they have no GroupWise needs.Why have "limited" support? Why not provide all the functionality in the Linux client?Yet this is what they are doing. They are limiting the support for their own mail server in the client for the desktop OS that they're trying to push.
Is that stupid or what?Great. So Novell is depending upon others to support their stuff. That's a plan for disaster.You don't know what ZEN is then. Red Carpet is great for installing packages, but ZEN also allows you to un-install packages and check permissions when you log in and base all of that off of your userID and group membership and machine. ZEN is great on Windows, but it sucks on Linux.
So, your answer is to use a different, more limited, system on Linux. Like I said, that's stupid.
Novell exists to sell software and support. Unless Novell can offer something better than I can download and manage myself, they will lose customers and die.Yes. Use ZEN to setup packages for a Windows box, including updating some packages and removing others, base it off of userID and groups and machines. Then try to do that with Red Carpet. If you can't, Novell failed.
Use GroupWise on Windows. Then compare it on Linux. If you find features missing on Linux, then Novell failed.
Microsoft is not going to wait for Novell to try again. Novell has to remain focused.
Red Hat isn't going to wait for Novell to work out the bugs. Novell has to remain focused.
Novell is in competition for customers and the competition seems to be more focused and successful at getting new clients.
Novell has to sell new clients on their product line instead of depending upon upgrades from existing customers. At this point, why would a new customer with a new network project choose Novell/SuSE over Microsoft?
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/ximian-conn ector/2.0/
LATEST-IS-2.0.2 12-Oct-2004 09:00 1.7M
ximian-connector-2.0.0-2.0.1.diff.gz 28-Sep-2004 15:50 250K
ximian-connector-2.0.0.md5sum 14-Sep-2004 02:27 129
ximian-connector-2.0.0.tar.bz2 14-Sep-2004 02:27 1.2M
ximian-connector-2.0.0.tar.gz 14-Sep-2004 02:27 1.6M
ximian-connector-2.0.1-2.0.2.diff.gz 12-Oct-2004 09:00 114K
ximian-connector-2.0.1.changes 28-Sep-2004 15:50 1.1K
ximian-connector-2.0.1.md5sum 28-Sep-2004 15:50 327
ximian-connector-2.0.1.news 28-Sep-2004 15:50 607
ximian-connector-2.0.1.tar.bz2 28-Sep-2004 15:50 1.1M
ximian-connector-2.0.1.tar.gz 28-Sep-2004 15:50 1.7M
ximian-connector-2.0.2.changes 12-Oct-2004 09:00 883
ximian-connector-2.0.2.md5sum 12-Oct-2004 09:00 327
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ximian-connector-2.0.2.tar.gz 12-Oct-2004 09:00 1.7M
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/ximian-conn ector/2.1/
I doubt anyone cares at this point, but I just wanted to point out that I dislike the term "advocate" being abused. And as a CONSUMER and not a STOCKHOLDER I'd rather maximize freebies. Goodness or badness or relative merits for "OSS" are besides the point, and I've been given no reason to think Novell would have, or will, contribute any more to open source without this guy, the "advocate"
Have you been given reason they would not ?
:wq
Of course, but you're not neccessarily an "advocate." I'm not sure that Novell, or more specifically, Stone, is promoting open source for anything other than self-interest, which is also fine and OK, but I don't consider it "Advocacy," especially when there are so many who advocate open source without ever hoping to receive financial benefit. I'm glad you're an open source businessman, and you certainly can do good things for Free (or "Free"?) Software, but there's not much you can do for me, and I can't judge you're contributions based soley on you're business decisions.