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?"

Comments

They Got 'Political Capital' with Us

[brandonp]

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!

Kicked Out?

[BisonHoof]

He may have been told where the door was. http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?News ID=2564 Too bad.

Re:I will say one thing:

[scupper]

Novell extends open-source push
Published: May 11, 2004, 12:42 PM PDT
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Excerpt:

For the second time, Novell has released the source code of a once-proprietary software package that makes it easier to substitute Linux for Microsoft's Windows.

Novell, a new power in the Linux landscape, announced last month that its YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) installation and configuration tool would become open source. And Tuesday, it said it would make the same change with Evolution Connector, formerly known as Ximian Connector, software that lets the company's Evolution e-mail and calendar program retrieve data from Microsoft Exchange servers.

Evolution Connector previously cost $69 per computer, spokesman Kevan Barney said. It will be available as a free download by May 15, though source code is available now.

Re:Sky is not falling, no film at 11

[dodgy_knickers]

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.

This is a non sequitur. Your assumption is that every person in the company contributes equally to the direction of the company. In fact, most companies are held together by surprisingly few people. The rest look to those key personalities for their direction.

If a highly influential leader departs Novell, and those left in his wake have different ideas, those ideas will gain traction because the most powerfull advocate for the status quo has disappeared. I've seen this happen. It's natural. Even on individual engineering projects the first thing many coders want to do when picking up a software project left behind by someone else is challenge the design premises and take the codebase in a new direction. It works the same way in management, only the "codebase" is the company.

The sky is probably not falling. But we cannot say conclusively that it is not falling based solely on the fact that Novell is a big company.

-kev