Suse Linux Founder Exits Novell

csplinter writes write to tell us that SuSE Linux founder Hubert Mantel has resigned from Novell stating "Too late for me. I just decided to leave Suse/Novell. This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." Novell confirmed his resignation but had little else to say on the topic. From the article: "Mantel's departure also comes less than a week after Novell announced a major restructuring that would result in 600 layoffs. It's unclear if Mantel's resignation is related to the restructuring."

Comments

13 years for what

[visionsofmcskill]

Its a tough week for novell when they loose botha founder and 600 employees.... makes you wonder just who is using their solutions anymore?

Re:13 years for what

[Amouth]

they have solutions???? damn i wish some of the places i go that have novell would look into that.. all i see is something you install and nothing works.. it isn't that it is broken .. it's just does nothing.. nothing at all..

Re:13 years for what

[KilobyteKnight]

I am for one...

I love Suse. It's my favorite distro by far.

Re:13 years for what

[krgallagher]

"I love Suse. It's my favorite distro by far."

Same here. I really do not understand staements like "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." Of course it isn't. It is Novel. Novel is an old corporation with a well known corporate culture. Mantel knew that when he sold the company. If he had any illusions, he was just deluding himself. I think the most telling quote in the article is "I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly. After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division." Sounds to me like corporate infighting and Mantel lost.

Re:13 years for what

[Reducer2001]

Perhaps you meant to say that administrators who have Novell solutions in place don't have anything to do? My company has NetWare servers for file/print/auth/e-mail/Internet proxy/etc. in place. Our servers have uptimes in the 100's of days (our best record was 438 days until the mobo died) and require almost no upkeep. Not to mention that I don't have to worry too much about nasty viruses coming in. Oh, and our NetWare servers have a bash prompt that I can use, as well as running several OSS programs (Apache, PHP, MySQL).

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh your god! That's terrible, you need proper availability not 100s of days..

www0-rth.thls.XXX.co.uk-xxxxxxx-2: uptime
  10:24pm up 2320 day(s), 9:55, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.02, 0.02
www0-rth.thls.XXX.co.uk-xxxxxxxx-3:

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, especially since kernel development is not exactly Ximians forte. This is probably a clash between company cultures. German engineers believe that quality matters while american managers know that playing golf with executives is more important.

Re:13 years for what

[TrekCycling]

It *was* my favorite distro until they decided to join Red Hat in the enterprise fray. I saw the writing on the wall and now I use CentOS. I know, a Red Hat rebuild. At least there is some stability with CentOS.

Re:13 years for what

[schon]

you need proper availability not 100s of days [...] up 2320 day(s)

How is 2320 not "hundreds" of days? It looks like just over 23 hundred days to me. :o)

Re:13 years for what

[Miguelito]

Same here.. Suse/Novell were willing to talk to us on pricing.. someone else, who we won't name, had the attitude of "we're all anyone supports, take the price or leave it" at a time when they wanted more then windows server cost on opterons or itaniums because 64bit was automatically "enterprise class server hardware." Whatever...

Finding autoyast to be much more powerful, rpms far easier to deal with and easier build custom ones, kernel easier to patch (when we need to, which is far less often), etc.

While I'd love to actually be able to use anything, even gentoo or something else, I like that we're getting some choice now rather then only 1 distro supported.

Re:13 years for what

[Amouth]

oh i have seen plenty of good set up netware servers.. my personal favorite is

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_no vell_server_discovered_after/

(a friend of mine was an admin up there when it happened.)

on the other hand.. i have seen horridly setup stuff.. and the client computers always having issues.. my favorite is watching network packets and seeing printer discovery packets from a school network in greensboro in a school network in wilmington..

Re:13 years for what

[Amouth]

for some reason i wish that was posted on the front page as a link.. just so we could slashdot it.

Re:13 years for what

[ScriptedReplay]

Same here. I really do not understand staements like "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." Of course it isn't. It is Novel.

This is SuSE's *founder* that you're talking about. Meaning he had a *vision* for his company which, from his quote, just isn't there anymore.

Sounds to me like corporate infighting and Mantel lost.

Of course it does - and that's probably what it is, too. The question is, however, *what did he lost to*? Now, if you look at the quote more closely, he's saying 'those smart guys from Ximian will pick up on kernel maintenance in no time' - which is of course untrue (at least the 'no time' part, although I suspect whoever will end up in his place will most likely *not* be coming from the desktop division) and to me it sounds like a veiled accusation that the Ximian guys pushed agendas in areas they had little clue about. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it does not sound that implausible in the light of recent evolutions at Novell that 'loud' was preferred to 'clueful'

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

More than that, it's not even Novel - it's Novell!

Re:13 years for what

[DTC-Bob]

I was very close to Suse here in the US prior to their acquisition by Novell. I worked with them closely, and we were even called out as a Suse success story on the road show.... Let's all remember that SuSE CHOSE to sell their company to Novell. No one had a gun to their head (although speculation was that some thought the market was *going* to be the gun...)... The founders, I am sure, did nicely, thank you. Bob

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.02, 0.02
Shesh like that baby is working hard

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

it sounds like a veiled accusation that the Ximian guys pushed agendas in areas they had little clue about.

I think you are correct.

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

you must not have "upgraded" to netware 6.5 then

netware since 4.2 has pretty much a big dissapointment to me

the OS itself is so stale and cobled together at this point, no one develops native netware NLM's anymore and the crap written in java are always stepping over each other for OS time

its just a mess, I manage close to 200 netware servers and each "upgrade" since 4.11/4.2 has been almost a step backward. Especially beyond 5.1

which is a shame because NDS kicks the hell out of AD or openLDAp

Re:13 years for what

[Phishcast]

"someone else, who we won't name...wanted more then windows server cost on opterons or itaniums"

I might not have figured it out if you hadn't given it away. :)

Re:13 years for what

[vawlk]

I am using their solutions because they are the best for my needs.

Re:13 years for what

[penguinrenegade]

Not to mention that Novell also dropped KDE recently. The "we're standardizing on Gnome" argument really isn't seeming to fly any longer (if it ever did). SUSE built a reputation for quality and Novell has turned SUSE into something else, and it's pretty evident.

Quality matters, and it showed with SUSE up until now. Novell is deprecating the OS and the people as well.

Re:13 years for what

[Stephen Samuel]

I'm thinking that it's got something to do with the the recent annoucement that Suse is standardizing on GNOME. I think that the reference to "lots of good people in the Ximian group" is a reference to that .... I'm guessing that the KDE hackers are feeling a little bit left out at the moment.

He may have figured that the combination of a powerful KDE group and a powerful Gnome group would have left the Novell linux group with a powerful one-two punch, but now the two punch (that his group was expecting to deliver) has been pulled behind the back.

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

Robert Love from Ximian, one of the Kernel Developers, doesn't have a clue about kernel stuff? As if...

I think it's more likely that this guy is just bitter over the KDE thing which doesn't affect this guy at all.

Just a SuSE employee temper tantrum that I hear they are famous for.

Re:13 years for what

[chronicon]

It *was* my favorite distro until they decided to join Red Hat in the enterprise fray. I saw the writing on the wall and now I use CentOS. I know, a Red Hat rebuild. At least there is some stability with CentOS.

What does that mean? Seriously. What are you saying? Are you implying that RHEL is less stable then CentOS? Why? How? Are you saying that you dropped SuSE because Novell is putting it up against RH in the enterprise space?

No disrespect intended but I simply do not get the point you're trying to make here.

Re:13 years for what

[Zemran]

It was probably 'those smart guys at Ximian' that advised Novell to drop KDE. Many users, me amongst them, who have stayed with SuSE for years will now look elsewhere and I should think that Mantel is aware of this since he was there when the last 'should we drop KDE' debate was held and it was decided that it was best to keep KDE as a lot of users prefer it.

Re:13 years for what

[ekwhite]

Your mention of Novell Netware is interesting. Just yesterday I was demonstrating Knoppix to a colleague, and, to my surprise, discovered I could bypass the Novell login without even trying. I was able to access my own files and the company intranet. Whether this is inherent to Novell, or just a lousy setup is unknown to me, as I am a total novice with Linux and servers.

Re:13 years for what

[Scott7477]

Your example just emphasizes why this guy probably left Novell...they couldn't sell their way out of a wet paper sack. Given that NetWare is robust and malware resistant, how come this message isn't getting to the people who authorize software purchases? Clearly corporations are willing to rip and replace systems when they're not working..just look at all of the examples of companies that tossed ERP implementations after spending millions of dollars. NetWare ought to be an easy sell.

Re:13 years for what

[toofast]

*applause*

Back in the day, I think the only reason Novell tacked on a GUI to NetWare was because of the pressure they were feeling from Windows NT and the new wave of "Admins" who were addicted to the mouse. NetWare 3.12/4.x was *the* file and print solution, and NDS is just so many miles ahead of Active Directory.

We run a cluster of SLES 9 servers, consisting of 4 Itanium2's, 4 x86_64's, 3 IBM Power5's and one x86, and they run flawlessly. No X, no KDE crap, just a barebones minimal install + the 25-or-so server packages we need. Keeping the OS up-to-date has been flawless as well, including Kernel upgrades.

It's nice to have a unified OS for all the hardware platforms we run.

To me, Novell rocks.

Re:13 years for what

[LordMaxxon]

>...the Ximian guys pushed agendas in
>areas they had little clue about.
>Maybe I'm reading too much into
>this, but it does not sound that
>implausible in the light of recent
>evolutions at Novell that 'loud' was
>preferred to 'clueful'

ximian... "evolutions"... c'mon, people, laugh!

Re:13 years for what

[Sir Joltalot]

The question is, however, *what did he lost to*? Now, if you look at the quote more closely, he's saying 'those smart guys from Ximian will pick up on kernel maintenance in no time' - which is of course untrue

I dunno dude, Robert Love is a pretty damn decent kernel hacker. The only kernel hacker, in fact, who has managed to both wite a non-sucky file notification API and get it checked into the kernel. There is also other more "low-level" talent on the Beagle team. So the Ximian team may very well be able to handle the kernel side of things.

However, it's a shame that there's this level of infighting at Novell; this kind of stuff totally destroys productivity. I really want Novell to do well; they're doing lots of good stuff, from fixing OpenOffice to Beagle to Mono. But at this rate, things don't look good.

Re:13 years for what

[donscarletti]

When your employ Gnome's founders: Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman, you should expect a little bias. Novell bought Ximian because they wanted the Gnome desktop from the onset. Blaming Ximian for this is like blaming a dog for eating meat left on the floor.

Re:13 years for what

[PygmySurfer]

lousy setup.

Re:13 years for what

[Zemran]

I accept your comments but still fail to see why the two have to be mutually exclusive. It does not add more to the overal cost than the KDE users contribute so it should be in the company's best interest to keep both. The tools are in place to run both side by side. I feel that Ximian wanted to turn their flavour of Linux into a commercial product. Novell want that as well and are taking it down the route that it is already on. In some ways this is a good thing as it improves the commercial viability of Linux and therefore the widespread acceptance of it but it is going away from what I, the enthusiast, wants.

The end result will be a stable, defined product that Novell can provide good customer support for. I want something that I can make do what I want it to do, otherwise I may as well install Windows. OK, I accept the horses for course bit but why not let people design their own horse and say 'but we only provide support for one type of horse'.

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

>ximian... "evolutions"... c'mon, people, laugh!

nothing but monkey business this is.

Re:13 years for what

[TrekCycling]

My point isn't the stability of the OS, but rather the stability of future of the OS. In Linux-land (where I've been living for years now) stability is about more than just the kernel. You need an organization behind the distro that is strong and vibrant and reliable, so that you know that if you install SuSE that it will be viable if you need security updates or upgrades in the future. I feared SuSE was going to lose that and go the way of Red Hat with RHEL. So I switched.

I consider RHEL to be the superior distro. I preferred SuSE, however, because it was a cheap way to get a high quality distro that I knew would be supported for years. The Novell purchase shook that confidence, I couldn't afford RHEL for personal use, so I went with CentOS and couldn't be happier.

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

Where XXX == bbc?

Re:13 years for what

[hdparm]

You would have been much better off with Fedora. Red Hat is behind it and it's very affordable. Works beautifully, too.

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you work that out ? ;) Anyway it's actively used by 30,000+ staff daily, but not sat on the Internet. Our best Internet facing was a little over 2000 days, usually we turn off boxes after a couple of years of 100% uptime due to their age making them too slow and a waste of limited rack space for their power. I powered off and removed two boxes with 720days each last night for example.

Re:13 years for what

[Zapdos]

Money does not come from the users.
Money comes from enterprise products and support.

Re:13 years for what

[donscarletti]

What you said still depends on the assumption that Ximian somehow orchestrated some massive covert conspiricy against KDE under the nose of an unsuspecting Novell. Novell knew what Ximian was, what they stood for and what they offered long before they were aquired. If they had no intention of strategically linking themselves with Gnome they would never have aquired Ximian since Ximian never had anything to offer except for expertise with that desktop.

In my mind the only logical explaination of this is that Novell decided that they wanted the Ximian desktop as their own and decided that they needed their own linux distro to run it and their other software on. Ximian and SUSE are being used for Novells own ends and have been from the very start. All decision made regarding major changes in SUSE's focus were made by Novell and had been pre-destined from the beginning.

Novell is in the buisiness of making money, whether dumping KDE was a good or a bad idea, it was made by Novell for the perposes of making money.

Re:13 years for what

[DrXym]

Sounds like a chance to take the OpenSUSE ball and run with it. But seriously, I think the reason KDE got dumped is simply because it's totally unsuited to the enterprise environment. It's easier to lock GNOME down, and GNOME is simpler and more usable to begin with. KDE has some great apps, but the platform would be support hell in any managed desktop situation.

Novell know this, Red Hat know this, Sun know this. That's why they've ultimately all gone with GNOME. It's not that KDE is intrinsically bad, but it's favoured features over usability which was great for a while but it's seriously hurting the platform now.

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a tough week for novell when they loose botha founder...

Many bothas died to bring you this information.

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been a SuSE user since 7.3. I switched to it after having my software development efforts totoally stopped multiple times due to repeated virus attacks on my boxes under Windows.

I've been happily developing without incident ever since.

As to KDE... well.... under SuSE I've always started off with KDE because it was a default, but they were kind enough to include GNOME and a dozen other desktop options --- I respect SuSE for that. :)

Personally, I always end up gravitating towards GNOME. It tends to be lighter and less memory hungry than KDE --- although I use some KDE apps under GNOME. And that's more than fine, I think. Also, for my laptop, GNOME is a little easier on the battery.

KDE I like just for its incredible candy sweetness. Even under GNOME I prefer using Konqueror 1000% over Nautilus... some things are just designed really nice.

And I have to admit... I have my parents running under Linux and I chose KDE for them as their environment. Konqueror is very easy to use and enough of the other features are there.

When I visit them I use KDE there.

I see nothing wrong with KDE or GNOME. I find them both good and always enjoyed that people had a choice. I will go on to say that because SuSE provided a wide range of choices integrated with the distrobution, that I am also a big fan of IceWM (I use it on my 200Mhz Pentium or equivalent class environments).

Well, that's my 0.02 quid.

Re:13 years for what

[laffer1]

Yes, but I think it should be pointed out that idiots exist in the Novell camp as well. My university has a large Novell network where every department excluding marketing, the library, the newspaper and engineering college use Novell file servers, print servers and the like. My boss is one of the novell administrators and he actually doesn't like open source software and hates the novell linux movement. He can barely use command line software. He ignores the novell strategy with linux and our server MUST be rebooted monthly or we lose iPrint and zen app support. I know this is a configuration problem and it reminds me of my former boss who had to reboot NT servers monthly. Regardless of platform, you should be able to pull off several month uptime if your servers are configured correctly.

My experiences have led me to believe that most novell solutions are duplicates to Microsoft, Apple or Sun solutions. When a solution is part of the OS, why buy a third party solution? The trouble with have syncing pda's with groupwise gives me nightmares. Intellisync does not work correctly, using novell's solution doesn't work and trying to use outlook/activesync with groupwise is just plain stupid.

Re:13 years for what

[Jim Norton]

you must not have "upgraded" to netware 6.5 then

Actually, he would have had to if he has the bash prompt available to him (unless he used the unix environment for Netware), I guess

Personally, I wonder how he does it. We are a Netware shop here and we have lots of problems with stability. We don't run any of our applications in protected memory space (yet) ... I can't imagine how it would be that stable without doing that.

Re:13 years for what

[rtb61]

Perhaps it could also have a lot to do with the typical corporate attitude and the distance between the bean counters and employees. A simple caculation would have indicated the cost of retraining staff to the new systems from the old systems was far more expensive than dumping them and waiting a bit a hiring new staff already trained or even rehiring some of the ex-staff who retrained at their own expence.

Staff loyalty is meaningless corporate marketing tactic to hold them at lower wages during the high times and then with out blinking an eye dumping them when profit margin start to sags whilst management grabs the wage increase and bonus.

It is not really the best business practice even though I can acknowledge how stubborn computer geeks can be in changing when they don't wont too and how much that can cost. Generally things would go the best if they dumped the old unsuccesfull management first because they are the most destructive ones as well as the ones most focused on what is best for them rather than what is best for the company, the "other" staff and the shareholders but of course they will never sack themselves :-( (first with the lawyers last with the responsibility).

"Too Late"?

[adavies42]

What is the "too late for me" in reference to? TFA give no clue.

Re:"Too Late"?

[darth_MALL]

Too late to save him from death after he finally turned back to the light side. SEE! There was still good in him!

Re:"Too Late"?

[cloudmaster]

It's probably just a poorly-translated phrase which means something else in German than in literally-translated English.

Re:"Too Late"?

[ElGuapoGolf]

I'm not sure what the "too late" comment means, but I think he takes a shot at some of the ximian folks later on when he suggests a maintainer for the SuSE kernel could be found from somewhere in the Ximian group.

Ouch. I mean, given the bloated (but usable) mess that is Evolution, would you want those guys maintaining your distribution's kernel?

I think he's right, SuSE isn't the same company anymore. Kubuntu, here I come.

Re:"Too Late"?

[mbanck]

I'm not sure what the "too late" comment means, but I think he takes a shot at some of the ximian folks later on when he suggests a maintainer for the SuSE kernel could be found from somewhere in the Ximian group.

Ouch. I mean, given the bloated (but usable) mess that is Evolution, would you want those guys maintaining your distribution's kernel?

Maybe he is thinking about the Man instead?

Michael

Re:"Too Late"?

[Anonymous Coward]

that things usable?

Re:"Too Late"?

[gad_zuki!]

> What is the "too late for me" in reference to?

Its, umm, Bladerunner. Right before he left Novell he reportedly also said, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Dramatic fellow. Maybe he should be an actor.

Re:"Too Late"?

[AhaIndia]

Ah! just when I finished burning 5 CDs os SuSe :(

Re:"Too Late"?

[blair1q]

ubuntu is better than kubuntu

Re:"Too Late"?

[Rock-n-Rolf]

The statement "Too late" is out of context here. It relates to an email thread on the SUSE internal kernel mailing list that has been disclosed to a number of external people. If someone could post the full email?

Re:"Too Late"?

[Roger Whittaker]

The "too late" was in reply to a promise by a fellow SUSE employee to forward the comments of others on the suse-beta-e list (regarding the Gnome/KDE stuff) to the management.

follow that dream!!!!

[johnnyR]

wonder what he'll do now? Maybe his dream was to be a dancer?

Re:follow that dream!!!!

[klagermkii]

Suppose he could always join Ballmer's troupe...

Novell == SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell == SCO for me. I treat them with the same respect from now on. Poor Novell suckers. I think Novell started killing off their own business. No money will ever stop the complaints coming from users and open source enthusiasts. The people in the world will from now on totally trash the name Novell. It will be set equal with the pigs from SCO, they will be treated the same way and their entire name will be worth nothing pretty soon. They will pay for the recent crap decisions.

Sour Grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

He's just pissed they dropped KDE for Gnome. That's gotta sting!

Re:Sour Grapes

[WindBourne]

Or he is bright enough to realize that competing head on with redhat and indirectly with Sun is a mistake?

At this point, how is Suse different from Redhat? I recently switched to Suse (from Mandrake due to their lousy QC). At the last job, I was coding on Redhat. I was loving Suse until the gnome/kde announcement. At this point, I am telling ppl if they want a Gnome distro to do redhat, and am back to looking for a good kde distro.

Re:Sour Grapes

[RedNovember]

OR you could go with SuSE 10.0, which has a very well polished KDE...

You forget, the average user doesn't want to upgrade an OS every release.

Re:Sour Grapes

[LDoggg_]

Install everything in fedora, log in, type "switchdesk kde" in a konsole window.
Now your distro is KDE distro... for that user account anyway.

Re:Sour Grapes

[CyricZ]

How is SuSE different from Red Hat? Well, first of all their system has proven to be far superior each time I've tried it. Fedora Core is not suitable for production servers (even if some people claim it is), and their commercial offerings aren't much better. It would fail during installation many times. This was even with FC4. SuSE, on the other hand, would just work.

Now, will the trend of SuSE being a quality distribution continue? Perhaps not. Things aren't necessarily looking up for SuSE since the acquisition. However, as of now their products are still quite stable, and from my experiences far better than Fedora.

And for your KDE-based distro, look no further than Kubuntu. It offers a solid Debian base with all of the amenities of KDE.

Re:Sour Grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

kanotix is pretty nice

Re:Sour Grapes

[slashdot_commentator]

Or he is bright enough to realize that competing head on with redhat and indirectly with Sun is a mistake?

How is that a mistake? Novell has something no other distribution has. A front seat to NDS. In fact, I'm pretty sure their whole original reason for their buying SuSE was to have a solid OS platform to run NDS off of. They probably were not even running against Redhat or Sun. It could be a Hail Mary comeback for network services management on Microsoft shops. Even if they're only partially sucessful, it salvages their original intellectual property (NDS). Also, initially, there might have been some hope of getting bought out by Sun. (Back many quarters ago, Sun had cash and was looking to acquire properties.)

At the last job, I was coding on Redhat. I was loving Suse until the gnome/kde announcement.

You are a sad, sad man. I hope you're still a kid. You base SuSE's distribution quality solely on the desktop it decided to consolidate upon. If Novell's entire strategy counted on its KDE users, it would be stillborn. The entire linux market is a zit on corporations' ass. Its total presence is server based. If Novell wants to claw onto the desktop/server market occupied by Microsoft, are they going to do it with a feature filled desktop that has Exchange compatibility, or with a relatively unknown KDE, who they have no pull in terms of guiding its development? Sun is Gnome, and Redhat is Gnome. And that is the environment any Fortune 500 company is going to consolidate upon. Novell wants to cut bodies, not keep KDE users happy. Grow up.

Re:Sour Grapes

[WindBourne]

Well, At my last company, we used Redhat. We found it stable enough (a bit rough at the edges, but stable), and more important, acceptable to various federal groups.

At home, I have been on Mandrake since it began. But about 2 years ago, their q.c. started dropping (and now sux). So I switched to Suse (9.3/10), thinking that it would be a good one for desktops. Why desktops? Because the server market for *nix and Windows is already fixed. Yeah, linux server is expanding, but for the most part it is either small new shops, or it is a site that is already fixed as what they will run. So that leaves Desktop.

First, these distros have to compete against Windows (a monopolist who has shown that they will do what it takes to compete; yeah, they are being watched; so what; the monitors are a joke). That will be hard. Next by doing Gnome, you are now trying to take on Sun and Redhat. That is wicked. Sun is just a grade above MS, and Redhat owns GNOME. Basically, trying to compete against MS is very difficult. Now, add 2 other companies who are also competitors. Suse will lose this battle.

Of course, as a KDE developer, I do think that it is a superior desktop. :). Kubuntu is something that I am considering. I was also thinking of pclinuxos (by Tex). There is some interesting work that they are doing

Re:Sour Grapes

[stilborne]

this is sort of off topic, but you have obviously never had to actually get exchange support working in a real world environment on GNOME then. or maybe you were one of the lucky few who had a half-decent experience. unfortunately right now there are no proper open source exchange clients. IMAP clients, sure. half-assed calendaring clients that mostly work with certain exchange server configurations, yes. but nothing better than that, and that doesn't cut it in the corporate world.

chasing the exchange rainbow is about as fruitful as chasing a real rainbow due to practicalities. a much more sound solution is getting people off of exchange and onto something more friendly. most companies that run exchange could do just as well with one of the alternatives out there.

but going around claiming "exchange compatibility" is just a way to lose credibility when people do their homework and check out the validity of said claim. losing credibility is not something the open source desktop needs right now.

Re:Sour Grapes

[donscarletti]

Or he is bright enough to realize that competing head on with redhat and indirectly with Sun is a mistake?

SUSE was always competing head on with redhat and indirectly with Sun. The desktop market is worthless, it's only in servers (and maybe corperate workstations) that anyone but MS or Apple can make any money. The fact that SUSE went from KDE distro to Gnome distro means absolutely jack for the server market since SUSE was never differenciated from Redhat by what desktop they use, they were differenciated by price, focus, support and location.

Re:Sour Grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "KDE distro" you mean "broken KDE-using distro whoose main purpose seems to be to break everything they can in KDE, then some more, and tell user "See? KDE sucks. That's why you shouldn't use KDE, go back to GNOME right now!"" then yes, you are right.

Re:Sour Grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh heh snicker snicker... GNOME... "Feature-filled desktop"... snicker... And KDE - "relatively unknown". You're living in Uranus or what?

Tell me, did your "feature-filled desktop" get a decent music player overnight that I do not know of? Or do you still use amarok when you think noone is looking? Or perhaps is play/stop button all GNOME zealots need from music player (that is, until totem implements something more)?

Re:Sour Grapes

[LDoggg_]

Seems to work fine here.
What part is broken for you? The only real difference I see is that fedora has its own default theme that they try to make look like their theme for gnome.

Re:Sour Grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point, how is Suse different from Redhat?

At operating system level, probably none.But at applications level, significant.

Suse earlier was about getting technically good solutions (KDE, Yast, XenVM etc.) from bottoms up and delivering to the customer.User is more or less free to do what he wants with the applications he runs. Company makes money from Base OS

Now, Novell wants to make it a part of a significant "ecosystem". They want to hide the base OS from the user. User should see Xenworks,Ximian, edirectory, iprint, evolution, mono(?) etc. etc.
What this means that is they are willing to sacrifice the "search for perfection" in base OS so that they can concentrate on the applications. Company now makes Suse free - look at how much more freer they made the downloads available, opensourced Yast etc.

In this change Kde had to be moved out and Gnome bought in and the complexity of the OS had to go in favour of simplicity (and ignorability). If suse looks the same as redhat so be it

I just cant figure out which is the cathedral which is the bazaar

Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Srdjant]

Could Hubert Mantel have quit due to Novell making SuSE a GNOME-centred distro instead of keeping it a KDE-centred one?

Novell standardise on GNOME: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/05/ 1620206&tid=223&tid=106

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could Hubert Mantel have quit due to Novell making SuSE a GNOME-centred distro instead of keeping it a KDE-centred one?

Yes. Actual quotes:

Elektroshock: Oh my God, Novell killed Kay-dee-ee!

Hubert Mantel: You bastards.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

The comment about finding a kernel maintainer was likewise interesting:

"I have been the maintainer of the Suse kernel for more than a decade now," Mantel wrote. "I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly. After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division."

It is enough to make one wonder if there is a power struggle, or at least the perception of one, arising from differences of opinion between the SuSE and Ximian groups. SuSE's technical excellence is perhaps not so appreciated as some feel it should be? How important is mono?

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[oever]

You are suggesting the GPL software cannot be for profit software. Also, if you want to keep your code private, using the GPL version of Qt is fine. Only if you publish a program under a different license that the GPL do you have to pay the license.

This should be no problem, since KDE is compatible with this requirement. Any software Novell might want to add would probably be GPL anyway, because that's the most common license for Linux distros.

Only if Novell wanted to develop a closed source program would the Qt license be a problem. But even then, it would be easy to use a different library if the license fee, (which is not that hight compared to dev. wages) was too much.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[DAldredge]

I know this. But QT says that you must pay them if you use QT in a for profit manor, which is incorrect.

And the major hangup isn't with Novell having to pay for the QT license, it is with Novell's CUSTOMERS having to pay for a QT license.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[oever]

Please give me an example where a company was forced to pay license fees to to Qt because SuSE uses KDE as a desktop environment.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[DAldredge]

I am not talking about having to pay because of KDE. I am talking about QT saying that if you develope a QT app that is used in business you have to pay them. IOW, Troll Tech seams to say that if you develope an KDE app that use QT for your business (little custom apps and/or in house apps), even if you don't sell said app, you have to buy a QT license because it would be "business use"

That scares away the suits. GNOME/GTK doesn't have that issue.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[oever]

So you agree that it's a fact that there is no need to pay a Trolltech license for in-house applications?

It seems to me you're only gripe is corporate _perception_, (what Trolltech 'seams' to say) not the actual license. I would not go as far as calling that an issue.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[paugq]

Your comment is stupid and shows a large lack of knowledge about Gtk and Qt.

Gtk is ugly to develop with, inconsistent, lacks a lot of functionality and it is a complete joke for multi-platform development.

Qt is so superior to Gtk it pays for itself so soon you will never regret buying it. A Qt license is worth half the pay of one developer for one month. Your company will recover that money immediately.

Had Suse used Gtk instead of Qt, Novell would be firing twice the people they are firing now. And the movement from Qt to Gtk is so stupid they are firing theirselves on the foot.

Bye, bye, Novell, you had the best (Suse Linux, ZenWorks and eDirectory) and you decided to suicide.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[CyricZ]

Do you have any proof to back up your claims, Aldredge?

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Waffle Iron]

Now, the *rest* of the context:

The Qt Commercial License is the correct license to use for the construction of proprietary, commercial software. The license allows you to:

Build commercial software and software whose source code you wish to keep private.

...

It doesn't say here that the GPL doesn't allow you to do these things, only that the QT commercial license does allow them. What the GPL allows and doesn't allow is in the GPL. The GPL is one of the licenses included in the software; that is the place to look for what you can and can't do with the software, not some website summary.

It's true that the website's tricky wording is probably bordering on FUD in an effort to encourage license sales. However, it doesn't actually say that you can't develop commercial open-source software without the pricey QT license.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[DAldredge]

The issue is that QT appears to be trying to get more people to pay for QT then is required. Some would say that their methods border on the dishonest.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[DAldredge]

Yes. That is what the underlined link in my post goes to. I also copied the revelent text for those too lazy to click thru.

So are you just lazy or an Idiot?

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[CyricZ]

Nobody is disputing the price of QT, Aldredge.

I was asking for proof, or even just evidence, to back up your claims that Novell cannot afford to purchase said licenses. That is, assuming they even have to do so for the work they're doing.

And please, Aldredge, refrain from your ad hominem attacks. They're not proper discussion technique.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Arandir]

To me, that sounds like subtle (or not so subtle) sarcasm. Perhaps Mantel heard the phrase "lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division" used one too many times as an excuse by his bosses, that he simply used it back at them.

After all, if you have a division of perfect people down the hall, why not let them work on the kernel? Even if they're applications people with absolutely no kernel experience, how hard can it be for perfect people who have all the answers?

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[DAldredge]

Not Novell, Novell's customers. You know the people who buy Suse for use in their shops/enterprises.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Jason Earl]

It's not that Novell can't afford the price of a few development licenses, but rather it is that Novell can't afford to put another company between itself and customers that want to develop for Novell's desktop. Imagine the following discussion between a Novell salesman and a potential development partner.

Novell salesman: "You want to develop software for the Novell Linux Desktop? Ok, well go talk to some tiny company in the Netherlands," (yes, I know that the company is actually Norwegian, I am making a point), "they own a critical piece of our development toolkit."

Development Partner: "Let me get this straight. You want me to develop software using an oddball development framework written in C++, and you don't even own the framework."

Novell salesman: "That's correct, on the plus side if you skip our fancy KDE libraries you can run your software on Windows too. Of course, QT-only applications also don't take advantage of some of the nice features of Windows, but if the cell phone industry ever comes out with a useful Linux-based cell phone you could probably port to that as well."

Development Partner: "I think that I am going to talk to Red Hat now."

Any way you slice it the fact that Novell doesn't own QT is problematic for Novell's use of KDE. Throw in the fact that most of the applications that Novell wants to sell as part of the Novell Linux desktop are either Gnome applications or allied with Gnome, and the fact that with Mono Novell can point Microsoft developers to a "way out" while still reusing their C# code and its no wonder that KDE is getting the short end of the stick at Novell. KDE is getting the short end of the stick from all of the big Linux players. IBM based SWT on GTK for the exact same reasons, and Firefox is based on GTK as well.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Gentlewhisper]

It seems to me you're only gripe is corporate _perception_, (what Trolltech 'seams' to say) not the actual license. I would not go as far as calling that an issue.


Sounds to be you have never dealt with business people, in the world of business perception is everything

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[ambrosius27]

Robert Love is from the Ximian division (see here). He is also a kernel hacker. (See, e.g., here; see also here.) So, the comment may not have been sarcastic at all. Ximian actually does have at least one very accomplished Linux kernel hacker.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Extreme bitterness, unjustified assumptions made by reading between the lines and general crack-headed zealous devotion to KDE. Yep... you got it bad son. Lie down, take a few deep breaths and think about your life.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Anonymous Coward]

A more direct quote:

"Are you being stupid on purpose, or were you born that way?"

(Linus Torvalds to Hubert Mantel)

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to burst your bubble, but you're comment shows so much cluelessness that it puts even Slashdot to shame.

Ugly to develop with? Is that a technical arguement? I think not. So you have a bug up your ass and have chosen Qt as your widget toolkit of choice because of your emotional feelings. Congratulations sir, you win a cookie with your fabulous technical argument there.

As far as the cost of the Qt license paying for itself? That's for each company to decide for themselves. There's no way for you, a clueless noob, to make that decision for all companies. You don't know every company's resources, technical needs, etc. Again, way to go - once again you try to make a technical argument using nothing but FUD. I applaud you, sir... I didn't think it possible to be this arrogant and self-deluded.

Had Novell used Gtk instead of Qt they'd be firing twice as many people? Really... Wait, this just in: All of Novell's products WERE based on Gtk. Guess that disproves your crack-addled logic.

Once again, you lose.

Game over, chap.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Dot.Com.CEO]

This is an extremely sensible point from a business point of view. This really makes sense.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[shutdown -p now]

Your comment is flamebait at best, trolling at worst. All emotions, no hard facts.

Mods on crack, indeed...

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[mderdem]

There is a reason for Trolltech to survive as a commercial entity despite a 2000+ USD price tag.

The product is selected by engineers all over the world (not only by programmers in US who are IMHO somewhat manipulated by GTK propaganda). Despite there exists alternatives like gtk,wx and many more. Some of them being quite interesting APIs and SDKs.

Qt is extremely well documented. Even though the signal-slot preprocessing is not that nice, it brings code clarity saving thousands of dollars when the project development itself costs about $100,000.00.

The market has decided for the successful product. If Gtk gets there too, no one would pay thousands of dollars.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Jason Earl]

Thank you. KDE is an example of an awesome technology that *should* win, but won't. KDE got off to an early lead, and it has some definite advantages over Gnome, but the licensing issues are destined to sink it. TrollTech is a development tools company and they have set up KDE so that everyone that wants to develop commercial software for KDE has to talk to them, and that's simply not something that the major Linux distributors are going to let happen. In the real world these sorts of licensing issues almost always trump the actual technology. In this case I think that KDE licensing issues are going to derail KDE even if a market for proprietary Linux desktop software never materializes.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I actually am an owner of a company that used to be a Suse and later on a Novell partner. Something in the past year did not make sense in their strategy (cannot really go into details but let's just say it's not good to know that what really is your best brand becomes in essence a free product really fucking up your marketing in a day - generally speaking partners who pay 1500eur a year for basically marketing and advance strategic info don't appreciate learning of Openexchange being dumped - stupid imo - and Suse becoming free).

KDE really is superior. I have some installations of NLD and I have chosen KDE over Gnome. I really have not regretted this choice. I can see no area in which Gnome is better than KDE other than configuration focus and, to be honest, I quite like KDE's configurability. A locked-down user (ie one who does not have access to the root password) can do whatever the hell they want on their area, configuring it the way they like while all admin stuff are very well protected. Gnome is just bland, no matter how much configuration goes into it.

Technically speaking, KDE is so far ahead it's actually embarassing. NOTHING is happening on Gnome. No long term drive, whereas the KDE people are actually going on to fight Vista with KDE4.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Arandir]

Everytime my company says "there are extremely skilled people over in Bangalore", someone gets laid off. That there REALLY are extremely skilled people over there does not negate the fact that people are getting laid off.

I greatly suspect that Mantel is quitting because all SuSE functions are being handed over to the Ximian group. One evidence for me is his "sarcastic" comment.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Jason Earl]

I have never really liked KDE, and I personally think that Gnome has the better set of applications (especially when you lump in the GTK-only applications with Gnome), but I will agree that the *desktop* part of KDE is much more solid than Gnome.

Any way you slice it, however, Novell has a long row to hoe with Linux. Basically Novell is in the same situation that Caldera was in after in bought SCO's Unix. Everyone knows that Linux is the future, but the current revenues all point at Netware, and competing with pure play Red Hat (with its much lower R&D requirements) is definitely tricky. Novell can't afford to develop three different email servers (Netmail, Groupwise, and OpenExchange) and so it spun off OpenExchange and "freed" Hula. Novell can't really afford to develop KDE either, especially since a huge part of Novell's message is that Windows C# developers can easily port to SuSE Linux. There was a time when it looked like Novell might consider Mono bindings for QT, but licensing issues nixed that pretty thoroughly.

Novell also had little choice but to open up YaST and create a Free version of SuSE. SuSE has always had a nicer distribution than Red Hat (as did Caldera back in the day), but the fact that Red Hat's installation tools were GPLed guaranteed that Red Hat's tools were the ones that got spread far and wide. If Novell is to survive it needs to be able to compete with Red Hat for marketshare and mindshare, and that means that a Free Software version of SuSE has to be at least as usable as Red Hat's Fedora.

Hopefully Novell will be able to make the transition from a proprietary software company to a company that is far more "services" based, but right now the company is in freefall. It's Netware core is dying, and the Linux business just can't make up the slack. This means that a lot of the choices that Novell would *like* to make simply aren't viable.

gnome the problem

[haxhia]

I wonder if the decision to switch suse to a gnome distro made him want to leave.

He's right that it's not the same...

[AvantLegion]

... SuSE offerings keep getting better and better.

Lost Another One...

[Anonymous Coward]

...To GNOME.ORG

Novell is going the RedHat way

[lonesometrainer]

Like RedHat with Fedora, Novell looks for Community backup with their OpenSuse.org project.

Their best option will be a profitable enterprise-linux distribution with _zero_ community backup.

They're making the life of all those shuttleworths' out there extremely easy.

Not good.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[cloudmaster]

Except that Novell didn't say "Oh, by the way - you people who paid for support for your product? Screw you, your year of support ends in April even if you just paid for a year a couple of months earlier. Feel free to buy our overpriced piece of crap version if you want continued updates." RedHat did.

BTW, Ubuntu's based on Debian, which was and remains community-developed. Shuttleworth just did it right (so far)...

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[nine-times]

Like RedHat with Fedora, Novell looks for Community backup with their OpenSuse.org project.

Right, damn those Novell people, open sourcing all the good bits from the companies they've acquired. They're just doing it because they want the community to help them! Let's not fall for it though-- we should all refuse to use YaST or the Evolution connector! If I make it so I can't connect to my e-mail, that'll show'um!

They're making the life of all those shuttleworths' out there extremely easy.

Yeah, because... it all plays into Shuttleworth's plan for world domination?

Damn it, Shuttleworth doesn't want Novell bringing more money into Linux development. Ubuntu is so good, we should just tell all the other developers, contributors, and people spending money on Linux to shove it!

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[talksinmaths]

Screw you, your year of support ends in April even if you just paid for a year a couple of months earlier. Feel free to buy our overpriced piece of crap...

I don't remember it being exactly like that. Although they clearly dropped support for RH9 in April, I thought they continued to honor the support agreements for their full terms if you upgraded to RHEL at no extra cost. I could be remembering things incorrectly though.

In any event RedHat seems to be doing OK selling their overpriced piece of crap version.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[rm69990]

Ah, yes, zero community backup will result in greater profit. This is why Novell/SUSE has been mopping the floor with Red Hat all these years. (Yes, I'm being sarcastic)

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[cloudmaster]

No, it wasn't free to upgrade. I seem to recall there being some trivial discount, but it was still more than it cost to download the month-old SuSE, migrate things, and then pay for the next upgrade to SuSE. The discount also didn't cover the cost we paid for all of our systems, nor did it give us access to the distro we were using for a reason (I didn't *want* RHEL).

And yeah, lots of people still pay for RedHat. This is mostly because lots of management-types want "someone to blame". Heck, the place I now work for uses RHEL all over the place for legacy reasons, but it's still a piece of crap. Just today I tried to write a perl script which needed to time events with sub-second accuracy. Perl 5.8 is installed, but apparently Time::HiRes is not - even though Time::HiRes is part of the core 5.8 distribution and it should be safe to assume that it's present if perl 5.8 is. But no, RedHat assed that up. Call that my reason of the day, though, not the single reason to call RHEL crap.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[div_2n]

This is mostly because lots of management-types want "someone to blame".

I find this idea increasingly erroneous. Management types don't wan't "someone to blame" but rather "someone to fix it" when all else fails. For example, if the mail server breaks while the person who manages it is on vacation. Or even if the IT staff doesn't know how to fix it. Yes, just admit it that there might be a system problem that needs to be fixed ASAP that you don't know how to fix but that the vendor may have seen 10 times in the last month.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[talksinmaths]

No, it wasn't free to upgrade. I seem to recall there being some trivial discount...

My bad then. I was pretty sure that one of my friends who'd paid the $60/year fee before they announced the EOL had been offered the free upgrade to RHEL-WS. He happens to work at a university, so now he pays $25/year instead of $60. Needless to say he didn't feel as though he'd been screwed over, but it's certainly understandable that others did.

Perl 5.8 is installed, but apparently Time::HiRes is not

This is off-topic now, but Time::HiRes is an RHEL provided package. Try "# up2date perl-Time-HiRes".

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[cloudmaster]

WTF are you talking about? First of all, a properly set up mail server doesn't break in ways that someone totally unfamiliar with the system and network layout can waltz in and repair "ASAP" - esp. if no one else knows anything about how it's set up. Second, any company spending the money for RHEL is probably also going to be large enough to spend the money on more than one IT person - if I'm on vacation, Chris can fix it. Third, any systems that are so important that they simply must be up 24x7 with no exceptions are *also* set up with some redundency in mind.

On top of all that, if the vendor's seeing the same problems 10 times in the last month, maybe they should get off their dead asses and fix the problem. *That* is what they're paid for - not so they can take the place of the company IT department when all of the IT guys are on vacation.

So, I find your line of thinking increasingly common, and increasingly irritating. An IT person isn't just a plug-n-play proposition, where experience and skills are irrelevent, and where any random person with "some linux skillz" can just pop in, figure out what the problem is and where the problem is (does *your* manager know how to get a vendor access to the mail server?), and repair it. I dunno, it sounds like you've never been a sysadmin and you have a particular disdain for an IT person wherever you work - probably because something you didn't understand took longer than you mistakenly thought it should to get done.

I stand behind my claim. Manager-types choose RHEL for the same reason they choose Win32 - either because they feel like they can't live without an app that runs on windows/RHEL or because they think that paying a lot of money magically makes things higher quality. I'd like to hear from *one* person who's purchased RHEL because they actually need the support *and* has used it. Until then, I'm saying that you don't know what you're talking about in terms of operating system decisions.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[cloudmaster]

I know it's a separate package, and I'm pretty sure that was done because it was a separate package in previous releases when perl 5.6 was used - and Time::HiRes wasn't in the core. Since it's in the core now, though, it *should* be installed whenever perl is installed (I don't see RH making IO::Handle, Storable, and POSIX separate packages) and the perl package should have the Time::HiRes provide. It's not a matter of it being difficult to rectify their error - it's a matter of there being an error in the first place.

Sorry, I'm particularly grumpy tonight. :)

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[talksinmaths]

Sorry, I'm particularly grumpy tonight. :)

No problem. Your posts haven't breached the borders of civility, and no offense was taken. In fact I understand your frustrations completely. I've encountered similar hassles with many a RedHat/Fedora installation. To be fair though I've also encountered similar bothers in SuSE, Debian, and other distros. I guess the general rule is that the more familiar I am with a distro, the less bothered I am by its particular idiosyncrasies.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[talksinmaths]

I just posted a comment saying your posts were civil, but I hadn't read this comment at that point. Your replies to me were certainly civil, but perhaps you might have been well served by including your 'grumpy' disclaimer on the above post as well. There is a clear tone of hostility in your reply the the GP, and although the GP criticized your argument I didn't detect the same hostility you showed. I don't mean to cast the first (or second) stone though. I've said things when I was grumpy that would make your post look like a compliment. :)

Anyway, back to being (somewhat) on topic...

I'd like to hear from *one* person who's purchased RHEL because they actually need the support *and* has used it.

It depends on what you mean by support. If you mean having to call RH to have them (for instance) figure out how you botched your sendmail.mc, then I've never used that kind of support. I've also never used that form of support from MS, Apple, or any other OS vendor. However if you mean support in the sense of utilizing automatic updates or other features of RHN (for instance), then I've certainly had experiences where that was a significant factor in choosing to purchase RHEL. In this context the support was obviously in fact needed and used. I know that other distros provide a similar level of 'support' at a lower cost (or for free), but that doesn't imply that RHEL can never be the most appropriate choice of distro. I'm glad that RedHat has had success in their target market because they've continued to make extensive contributions to the OSS community.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[cloudmaster]

Yup - that's the one that triggered the grumpy disclaimer. :)

You seem to be making the distinction between "provinding technical support" and "supporting the system by releasing updates and security patches sometimes". The post I replied to did not. Partially due to my bad mood, I took personal offense at the implication that I have delusions of granduer based on my positon as a sysadmin, as well as at the implication that people in said positon are not actually as important as they think they are. It's also partially because the last place I worked for hit some financial troubles, and I was one who was asked to leave, under the assumption that the small business woudl get by fine without any IT people and that non-technical employees would all be able to administer their own workstations just fine. Coincidentally, the mail and imap server for this company - whose business was creating web sites - experienced a hardware failure within a few weeks (no, it wasn't sabotage). They were offline for nearly a full week. RHEL's support wouldn't have done them any good, since it turned out to apparently be something at the system board level. I wonder if they calculated how much it cost them to be offline while the people with little to no experience tried to debug the problem and bring the services back up on a different machine v/s how much it would've cost them to have kept me - someone who's succesfully fixed similar problems within a mater of hours and who wouldn't have gone home until it *was* fixed. Eh, their loss - I was told I had 1 month on Friday, and had an interview on Monday which resulted in a job offer by Wed. Whoops. :)

Back to the topic at hand, sort of, I do appreciate RedHat's contribution to the community, as well as their part in making Linux a more commonly known solution. I've long held a feeling that they do it more because it's good business than because they really think it's the "right thing to do". Sort of a "we should throw those geeks a bone so they don't try too hard to replace us with something else" kind of thing. It just feels like they do something crappy for every thing they do nice. Like the LSB thing - they have this setup that's supposed to help standardize, but it's poorly documented and the test utility does dumb things tha are redhat specific. I guess it's similar to the way I feel about car salesmen. Sure, they appear friendly and smile to my face, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that they'd stab me in the back if it'd get them another couple of dollars.

Realistically, that's just something I personally dislike about RedHat. It's perfectly fine for a company to be more interested in money than in ideals. But you know, I like Linux et. al. for the ideals more than the cost savings. I'd really like my vendor to really feel the same way, or at least be up front about it if they aren't. SuSE - they've always seemd quite clear about how they're about making money, but they give the stuff away after a month or so because it's the right thing to do. Ubuntu has a real strong community feel where the money is made to look like a secondary concern. Redhat, though, they just rub me the wrong way, but they don't do it enough for me to 100% condem them.

Re:Novell is going the RedHat way

[talksinmaths]

Sorry to hear about your job troubles. I've worked at places where sysadmins were similarly regarded. Hopefully the Karma gods will soon bestow upon you a better gig than you had before.

Time to Fork Suse

[Bruha]

Novell promised big things for Suse 10. Claiming it was a Windows Killer. I find it no better or worse than the last version of Suse 9.

What Novell is doing here is creating a platform for Ximian and the only way to get any distro to accept Ximian was to buy Suse. This apparently has proven true with Hubert's comments that Ximian had lots of talented people.

Re:Time to Fork Suse

[DAldredge]

When did Novell promise that Suse 10 would be a Windows Killer?

Please show us a link or two to support your position.

Re:Time to Fork Suse

[daeley]

I think it was the press more than Novell, but they sure didn't mind mentioning it in passing as early as 2001 -- and that was version 7.1!

Re:Time to Fork Suse

[rm69990]

ummm, HELLO!!! That was a SUSE press release, not a Novell one. Novell didn't aquire SUSE until 2003 (aquisition completed in 2004). Novell is still hosting their old press releases on their website.

Re:Time to Fork Suse

[RedNovember]

"SUSE LINUX 7.1 with the new 2.4 kernel was highly anticipated by the Linux community and reviewers were writing "SUSE 7.1 is Chockful Of Goodies" (byte.com) and named "An Embarrassment of Riches" (linuxnovice.org). Although many reviewers did not agree to the Linux Planet statement: "Pack It Up and Go Home: SUSE Created a Windows-Killer", all of the reviewers agreed, that there is now a serious competitor lighting the radar screens. Offering a cut down, simple "Personal" version, did the important step towards the non-technical "non-geek" home desktop users."

Sounds to me too like it's not Novell talking. Hype is not the sole responsibility of the company.

Re:Time to Fork Suse

[daeley]

ummm, HELLO!!!

I was agreeing with the grandparent. Try and keep up, okay?

Re:Time to Fork Suse

[Software]

Novell didn't issue that press release, SuSE did. Novell bought SuSE long after April 2001. I think the "About Novell" boilerplate at the bottom is just tacked on to all Novell press releases in that folder.

who is it unclear to?

[frovingslosh]

It's unclear if Mantel's resignation is related to the restructuring.

Who is it unclear to? And what are they smoking?

Re:who is it unclear to?

[AkaXakA]

1 down, 599 to go!

Especially...

[alamandrax]

When we took away his stapler. That just pissed him off.

Re:Especially...

[Robocoastie]

ROFLMA good one

The question for Novell is...

[Hymer]

Is SuSE without Hubert Mantel a SuSE people want ?

Re:The question for Novell is...

[TrekCycling]

Exactly. Anyone who ever used SuSE (I used it for 3 years until they were purchased) knows Mantel if only because of the famous "Mantel Kernels" that would include special features not in the regular kernel. His contribution both to the distribution and offline were a big part of what made SuSE great in its time.

Re:The question for Novell is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who moderated that off topic , and what sort of crack where they smoking .

My Bet

[Crimsane]

If I had to make a wager as to why he left, I would bet someone close to him got layed off and he put his own job on the line to defend them.

I was sad to hear suse layed of This dude who was doing lots of xforms stuff for FF.

But of course Novell has been doing lots of good for a while now, all the time losing money, so I couldn't be too critcal.

Probably not a big deal

[Jherek Carnelian]

This departure is probably no big deal. Every single "amicable" corporation acquisition that I have ever seen worked out the same way. The founders of the acquired company stay on board in order to help assure a smooth merger. But after about a year or so, they almost always take off for new projects. I suspect that sticking around until now was a contractual obligation on his part as part of selling the company.

These guys tend to be of two types - "startup" guys who don't think it is fun to run an established business, or a "control types" who aren't satisifed unless they are running the whole show. Either way, when they sell the company, they are no longer in the position that most appeals to them so they move on as soon as they can.

So, I wouldn't take this event too seriously, he's probably had short-timer's disease for the last six months anyway.

Re:Probably not a big deal

[segedunum]

Every single "amicable" corporation acquisition that I have ever seen worked out the same way. The founders of the acquired company stay on board in order to help assure a smooth merger. But after about a year or so, they almost always take off for new projects.

Since when has losing good people, of their own accord, ever been 'no big deal' for any company?

Re:Probably not a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when has losing good people, of their own accord, ever been 'no big deal' for any company?

Woooosh!!!!

Since it was inevitable the day the company was acquired, that's when.

Re:Probably not a big deal

[T-Ranger]

The point is that such a departure is normal, and should be expected. Being normal and expected, it could be planned for, and thus, no big deal.

Re:Probably not a big deal

[superpulpsicle]

Can you define "good people" please. Is that someone with skills? Someone with loyalty? It's a different world everybody is trying to save their own ass.

Re:Probably not a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

> Is that someone with skills? Someone with loyalty? It's a
> different world everybody is trying to save their own ass.

Yes a) a Kernel hacker, b) founder of SUSE

I thought you read the article before giving comments. Poor you!

Yet another Novell failure

[stryemer]

Someone should put a stop to Novell. SuSE may be the next in a long line of great products (Corel, WordPerfect, etc) that Novell flushes down the toilet. It's really too bad because from my experience with SuSE was better than RedHat and Windows. Hey Novell management, fire yourselves!

Re:Yet another Novell failure

[rm69990]

Red Hat's founders have left also. This could just be a case of the person not liking to work for established businesses, and instead prefering startups. He may also be a control freak, and doesn't like Novell running things the way they see fit.

Re:Yet another Novell failure

[Tandoori Haggis]

SuSE Linux was my full time replacement for MS Windows. I was wary of Red Hat which seemed to be biased towards Gnome. I tried Gnome but it turned me right off. It seemed to be resource hungry and too much like Windows for my taste. Once, the Bonobo Activation Client was accidentally activated by a misplaced mouse click. This caused continual spawning of Galeon. A fleet of Galeons, (pun intended), brought my PC to its knees. Due to lack of available system resources it was almost impossible to kill the processes. Eventually I logged on with a different desktop environment and removed Gnome.

The tendency for various packages to have inconvenient cross interdependencies was annoying.

I still prefer SuSE to Red Hat but perhaps they are both trying to satisfy as many diverse needs as possible. The trouble with standardisation is that someone is always going to be unhappy with the vendors choice of packages.

IMHO SuSE have done a great service to the Linux community but I'm always wary of take overs. Meanwhile I'm trying out OpenBSD when time permits

Restructure...

[Anonymous Coward]

/ Sorry, SuSE's restructuring supposed   \
| that chamaleon got fired. Get used to  |
| me: the more efficient, featureful     |
\ allmighty and POSIX compliant Clippy!  /
        \     ____
         \   / __ \
          \  O|  |O|
             ||  | |
             ||  | |
             ||    |
              |___/

Re:Restructure...

[AndroidCat]

Oh yeah?

Re:Restructure...

[keg]

funniest comment on /. to date.

So why no KDE??

[questro]

Is this guy leaving because KDE is being dropped? I really like SuSE and have been using it for a while. KDE is a big part of that. I like the polish. Is there some license issue that's driving the KDE issue? What gives? I hate to go switching distros AGAIN! This is why I stopped using RedHat/Fedora.

Re:So why no KDE??

[cloudmaster]

I like the Polish too, but I'm not sure what they have to do with KDE in SuSE. Maybe if you were telling a lightbulb replacing joke it would be relevent that you like the Polish, but not here.

I'm gonna have to drive by the Weinerschnizel on the way home now, and get a Polish sandwich. Or maybe just some mini corn dogs. Yeah, I think I'll get mini corn dogs. I like the corn dogs *and* the Polish.

Re:So why no KDE??

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll! What the hell? I guess some moderator doesn't like the Polish...

Re:So why no KDE??

[rm69990]

Ummm, possibly something to do with Novell trying to satisfy corporations, their major customers. Make no bones about it, you don't mean two shits to Novell when it comes to their real customers.

Oh, and a little reading on your part would show you that unless you're running Novell Linux Desktop or SLES, you can still use KDE. Of course, sensationalism and conspiracy theories are the norm around Slashdot.

Re:So why no KDE??

[J.R. Random]

Is there some license issue that's driving the KDE issue?

Well, of course with KDE there is that perpetual licensing issue -- commercial developers must either GPL their code or send $ to TrollTech, as KDE is based on QT. I see it as no biggie myself (if the Trolltech license fee is a show stopper you don't have a serious business plan anyway) but I'm sure the Gnome advocates at Novell pushed that issue among others.

Re:So why no KDE??

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess some moderator doesn't like the Polish...

Bastard. After all the Polish did to halt software patents in Europe.

Re:So why no KDE??

[Anonymous Coward]

> Maybe if you were telling a lightbulb replacing joke it would be relevent that you like the Polish, but not here.

- How many Poles does it take to change a lightbulb?
- Only one, but if he goes on strike you need 6000 Soviet troops.

Disclaimer: I like the Polish.

Re:So why no KDE??

[wik]

At least he didn't forget Poland.

Re:So why no KDE??

[billybob2]

Is there some license issue that's driving the KDE issue?

KDE is built on QT, a C++ framework released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), a free software license that has strong copyleft (forced sharing) protections meant to ensure that derivative code stays free.

Some corporations are raising hell against QT and KDE because the corporations want to make proprietary, non-free, closed-source software on the QT framework without compensating the makers of QT. Of course, those same corporations don't have to pay anything if their applications are free and open source. In this way, QT is actually encouraging companies to give back to the community, something beneficial for users as a whole.

Debunking KDE Myths does a good job disproving the FUD against KDE and QT.

Re:So why no KDE??

[houghi]

From the openSUSE mailinglist from a Novell person:

"we are not dropping KDE entirely, we will make Gnome the default and the recommended platform but the plan is to continue to offer KDE as an option in all of the Linux products. We have had to implement a large restructuring in the product development area and needed to focus our efforts. We are working on a full FAQ on our desktop strategy that will be available to you, but we will not be eliminating KDE as a part of this plan. I hope this helps."

And that is only for the Novell software, not for the openSUSE and SUSE part, as far as I know.

Re:So why no KDE??

[Anonymous Coward]

> Novell when it comes to their real customers.

Please tell me one real customer that prefers a crappy desktop like GNOME ? Oh and oyu are by far the biggest conspiracy spreader, bullshit teller and liar existing. So who gives a fuck to someone who has the most comments moderated down on a place like Osnews ?

Re:So why no KDE??

[Anonymous Coward]

Some corporations are raising hell against QT and KDE because the corporations want to make proprietary, non-free, closed-source software on the QT framework without compensating the makers of QT.

While this may be partially true, this is not the whole story. The page Debunking KDE Myths is useful, but it does not mention the issue of choice when starting the development of an application. (Note that this is not a KDE problem, but a Qt problem.) Basically, if you are developing an application in-house and you are not sure about whether or not you will release it as a commercial product or not (i.e., outside your company) and whether it will be open source or proprietary, then you have a problem because TrollTech does not allow mixing bits developed with the free version of Qt (GPL) and with the version licensed from them. This does not matter much if you are an individual developer because it is unlikely that anyone will check how you have built your application and whether or not you have written some bits before acquiring a license from TrollTech. But this is different if you are a company and you have to be able to prove that you did things in the right way (right from a legal point of view). So companies who would like to have the option to release some code as closed-source have to buy Qt licenses even if in the end they release their code under the GPL, LGPL, BSD or any other license compatible with the GPL. Many companies do not like to be forced to take that decision early in the development process. Of course they could always negociate with TrollTech, but why go through this trouble when they can select other toolkits instead?

Another issue (which is probably the most important one) is a matter of control and business relationships. Even if TrollTech does a lot of good things for the Free Software community, companies like Novell (or Red Hat) may not be so happy to have TrollTech between them and their customers. It does not matter that much that Qt's future is safe even if TrollTech would disappear (due to the GPL and the licensing to the foundation). The problem is that, as long as TrollTech exists, TrollTech controls much of Qt's future. And companies like Novell, Red Hat or even IBM and Sun may not like to depend on that company, or simply to be more or less forced to promote that company when they sell a desktop environment to developers who intend to write applications for it.

Those Ximain Guys?

[Erore]

Rather interesting choice of words there at the end referring to the talent of the Ximian folks. Makes me wonder his resignation is tied to possible internal power struggles between KDE centric SUSE folks and GNOME centric Ximian developers. From last weeks announcement we know who won those battles, and it's possible his resignation is just part of the fallout.

Re:Those Ximain Guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ximian just got the better deal in their take-over, if you're talking about having influential positions. For Ximian, the take-over seems to have increased their power. SUSE, on the other hand, is just being stripped of all its executives and now also of the desktop look-n-feel that it has had for almost a decade :-(

No

[RedNovember]

Wrong.

The only reason I decided to try SuSE at all was because they finally had a non-crippled, community driven initiative in SuSE 10.0 OSS. The community is something that will work for them.

Plus, SuSE is more user-friendly than RedHat, and therefore puts more consumers at ease. There is a reason RedHat is mainly a server distro.

Re:No

[AvitarX]

There is a reason RedHat is mainly a server distro.

Wow, times have changed.

Seems like flamebait and troll, but maybe not...

[porkThreeWays]

Since Novell has taken over, they've open sourced a lot of suse. Yast is now open source. The basic suse linux distribution is now freely available immediatly (there used to be a wait time and ftp only installs). Maybe there have been massive internal changes that aren't aparent to the public, but it seems to me they've become more open lately. The quality of Suse offerings have become better as well. I tried suse a few years ago and wasn't terribly impressed. Lately however, I've been inclined to use it on my desktop and some servers.

Not Unexpected. Next Stop Bankruptcy

[segedunum]

Well, some of us could have told him that as soon as Novell took over Suse. Novell has a terrible track record of making anything work.

The warning signs were there when Richard Seibt and a few others left some time ago, as well as other Novell employees who didn't even come from Suse like Alan Nugent. And despite the positive spin some people in the company have tried to make of this for their own ends, there's no denying that a lot of people from different parts of the company have been layed off. Yes, even a lot of Gnome oriented people have gone, which means that Novell has no resources and people whatsoever to carry out all of those desktop plans some people say they're doing. They're going to need to spend even more money just to tread water and maintain everything. Looks like there's some truth to Kurt Pfeifle's article, and Mantel's swipe that they should be able to find someone talented to replace him as a kernel developer from Ximian is telling.

Novell may end up with no Gnome or KDE at all, or even worse, no Linux. People talk about KDE and Gnome a lot, but the fact is that Novell haven't even moved to Linux - that's where the real problems are. Open Enterprise Server is a bastardised Linux OS with Netware running on top of it. What customer wants that and what's the point?! No one judging from the people not buying it and going Red Hat instead. Unless this new COO really does understand his market, the technology and what's required we're seeing Novell go bust right here. Judging from this he's got the basic concepts of how to make people redundant badly wrong. Get that wrong, throw in the towel because it's not worth the effort. You need the right people on your side, not to alienate them.

Re:Not Unexpected. Next Stop Bankruptcy

[deviator]

Hi. No, you're slightly incorrect about OES -
I have always been a huge fan of Novell's software; it tends to be stellar stuff. But they have never been able to market their way out of a paper bag since Microsoft decimated Netware back in the NT 4.0 days. Still, products like GroupWise and eDirectory (NDS) have no _real_ technical equivalents in the market.

OES is not "Netware on top of Linux" - it's actually a collection of java-tomcat (web-based) services that previously ran on Netware that now also run on Linux. Things like iPrint, eDirectory, iFolder, iManage, NSS, etc. You can run these enterprise-value-added services on Netware 6.5 or on SuSE Enterprise Server 9. The management tools are the same for both platforms. It all works quite well--and they've had rave reviews, actually. Once again, their software is stunning - but their marketing sucks.

I have been playing with OES here - and really, really like what I see. Imagine being able to deploy SuSE 9 across a large enterprise and having _real_ tools to manage them all! That's the promise of what Novell can deliver - but again, the message has somehow been completely lost on the appropriate people.

I doubt they will declare bankruptcy - Novell has come back from the dead many, many times in the last decade (just like Apple!) But they definitely have some serious challenges to deal with in the coming months, as their traditional Netware revenue base has all but dried up.

Re:Not Unexpected. Next Stop Bankruptcy

[plieb]

> Open Enterprise Server is a bastardised Linux OS with Netware running on top of it.

I have to take issue with that one. OES/SLES9 is pure Linux. It is a complete install of SLES9 with some great Novell services that run on it. There is nothing bastardised about it.

My take on this is that Novell has done a great service for its NetWare customers by giving them an easy migration path to Linux. This may not pay off very well for Novell because once their customers are on Linux they may realize that they don't really need Novell anymore.

Re:Not Unexpected. Next Stop Bankruptcy

[endeavour31]

Groupwise has no technical equivalents in the market place? Are you on crack? I'll bet Domino/Notes and Exchange shops will laugh at that assertion. Please name one superior aspect of Groupwise which belies it's tiny markketshare.

Zenworks and eDirectory I'll give very high marks for - they are excellent. But having used all three of the commercial email packages the Groupwise comment is, on it's face, completely ridiculous.

Outside of NOS, Novell has utterly failed to impress with any product acquisition regardless of the quality or market position when bought.

Re:Not Unexpected. Next Stop Bankruptcy

[deviator]

GroupWise has _by far_ the lowest cost of ownership of the three major collaboration packages. Additionally, it is immune to virus/worm attacks that plague Exchange. It is far easier to deploy than Notes yet gives you 90% of the same out-of-box functionality. It's really, really stable & mature- and far more efficient than either Exchange or Notes. It is _incredibly_ reliable.

It also is built around the concept (used to be big, but they haven't pushed it in a while) of the "universal inbox" - like some of the other better PIMs of way back when; a GroupWise item can be any type you want it to be, and can be morphed into other items. Item types are extensible - you can create new types without much work. It has supported dynamic search folders for years, and supports tagging and linking to multiple folders. Full-text indexed search has been integral to the entire system since version 5.0 came out in 1997. It has also supported "Caching mode" for several revisions - which is new to outlook 2003. It ALSO runs on Windows, Linux, or Netware - you can run an entire GroupWise system completely on a LInux network. End-to-end communications have _always_ been secure, and now all end-to-end communications can run over SSL as well. It is a very, very powerful product.

Exchange, still, basically, sucks. Most of our customers use it; it's an OK e-mail client with a built-in calendar & some collaboration features. But it is not innovative. I have yet to see another collaboration platform match GroupWise feature-for-feature.

The Conversations

[mpapet]

The guy probably heard a few of these lines before throwing in the towel.

1. Bring that point up at the next meeting.
2. Check with person X to okay Y.
3. Find out when person Z's subordinate has the time to do that task.
4. I know you preferred Option A but the company is doing Option B.
5. Fill out that form and give it to accounting and wait 30 days to get reimbursed.
7. The Board has decided to go a diffferent direction.
8. Let me run that by person A before doing anything.
9. Send me an email about it to remind me....

There's a bunch more probably much funnier too. Join in and add a few!

Re:The Conversations

[segedunum]

Let's touch base on that!

Re:The Conversations

[The Monster]

10. I think we need to establish a committee to deal with that.
11. Is this initiative compatible with our Mission Statement?
12. Can we proactively leverage vertical syergies to deliver five-nines reliability?
13. We need a subcommittee to work on that aspect of your plan.
14. Now that you've written all that code, we're changing the design specs on you.
15. ...again.
16. If there's such a thing as a sub-subcommittee, we'll be needing one of those.
17. We need a cross-departmental task force to get a wider perspective on things.
18. The task force needs to divide itself into committees along departmental lines.
19. We need to make everything top priority!
20. ???
21. PROFIT!

How is that "insightful"?!

[codergeek42]

Silly mods. That should be +1 Funny, not +1 Insightful. *sigh*

Re:How is that "insightful"?!

[alamandrax]

heh heh. insightful. one almost feels sentient.

Re:How is that "insightful"?!

[genooma]

go back to realotw pussy!

fork it?

[towsonu2003]

someone better fork (open)suse as soon as possible before it dies with novell...

Re:fork it?

[rm69990]

Explain to me how it would die with Novell? Does it really matter whether it forks before or after Novell dies?

Ximian division?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division

    Is that a comment on mperhaps the Ximian guys being laid off too? Goddamnit, I like Suse and would hate to see Suse founder with all of the headway they've been making in the community.

Re:Ximian division?

[Stumbles]

IMV, it means a lot fewer Ximian folks were hit and a lot more KDE folks were hit. If memory serves correctly, wasn't Suse primarily a KDE desktop distro? Yes I know they had gnome but I have always had the understanding they preferred KDE.

Re:Ximian division?

[Jason Earl]

Yes, in fact, SuSE was one of the primary sponsors of KDE. A lot of the KDE developers had (and maybe still have) jobs at SuSE.

I didn't know that Clippy was POSIX compliant!

[codergeek42]

Does that mean I can actually run `killall clippy`? SHWEET!

I agree...

[ylikone]

but will undoubtedly get modded down like you... but I think this is something that should be modded up, not down. I'm sure many others agree. I have a deep distrust of any large corporation because the end motive is always just money. Novell will drive SuSe into the ground. So, stop being wussies and mod the parent UP! You know you want to.

I have been on the fence, but this does it

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never particularly liked the leadership and vision of RedHat. I guess RPM worked on some level and put them on the map, but I've hated it since I first started having to use it.

So I've always been hoping for another group to step up. I thought I had found it with SuSE, where I experenced for the first time on Linux, something approaching a fully integrated GUI.

However, this move signals that Ximian is going to start to get their hands all over SuSE and essentially ruin it. I hated the Ximian Desktop and those guys have absolutely NO SENSE WHATSOEVER about polish and quality. They royally suck. Then, add in stupid crap like MONO and that whole nonsense, and it's so easy to decide it's not even funny. GNU classpath is almost there, Eclipse already compiles and runs on Fedora core.

You can get every level of fully community supported+bleeding edge, community supported on top of enterprise-ready (whitebox, centos, etc.), all the way to complete enterprise support.

It's been a long, hard fought and well deserved win for RedHat in the area of Linux dominance through proper leadership instead of strong-armed tactics. I'm going all Fedora/RedHat on all my new systems.

Re:I have been on the fence, but this does it

[Anonymous Coward]

if you ask me, SuSE has been the crappiest distro ever produced. German Engineered has become synonymous with utter crap. Since Novell has acquired SuSE, tho, the distribution has improved a lot. I can only imagine this was due to the folks at Novell and Ximian who actually are clueful.

all I have to say is...

[DarkProphet]

So long and thanks for all the SuSE!

(Apologies to both NOFX and the late Douglas Adams)

Re:all I have to say is...

[coastwalker]

I will second that, SUSE used to be fun. The Novel website now makes it look like a pile of corporate BS, you have to navigate so many layers of synergy you cant find anything any more. On the other hand you cant charge millions for something that is easy to understand, so I guess its just the way of the world

Re:all I have to say is...

[DarkProphet]

Yeah I am really bummed about it. I switched to SuSE back about 3.5 - 4 years ago. I liked that they sort of built around KDE. I went to great pains to have KDE even on my old redhat boxes. I just like it better, and I am disappointed that Novell is doing just what I hoped they wouldn't. To their credit, the latest releases have been good (your point about the website is right-on, though), I just get the feeling it might be a downward spiral from here.

I know there are other distros out there that may be more to my liking, but I prefer YaST for dirty work because I just don't have the time or desire to edit configs all day anymore. I wonder if Novell will keep the YaST source open so it can be used by other distros based on SuSE SuSE (as opposed to Novell Suse)?

Re:all I have to say is...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes qt is not from an US company so it's GPL its less worth

Proof?

[alandd]

How do you know "What Novell is doing here is creating a platform for Ximian and the only way to get any distro to accept Ximian was to buy Suse." ??

And by what stretch of logic is the above "proven true" by "Hubert's comments that Ximian had lots of talented people." ???

Wish him well

[FishandChips]

Perhaps it isn't very important why Hubert Mantell has left SuSE, only that he has. Much more important is a big vote of thanks to someone whose dedication and hard work have done an immense amount for SuSE and most likely for anyone who uses Linux (at lot of them will have started out with SuSE). He helped found the company, after all. Here's wishing him all the very best in life and whatever he decides to do next. Sometime soon, Novell's loss will be our gain.

Re:Wish him well

[sirdude]

Couldn't he just fork SUSE and continue what he's been doing just the way he wants to?

Novell-Borg screw up again

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell is an assimilating race, like Borg.
It recognizes some good tech,
gets it,
survives for a while,
then screws up.
And then it needs to move to the next one..

Re:Novell-Borg screw up again

[mink]

Nah, they are not the Borg. They are the Pakleds. They look for things.

Mod Parent up. Insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

coz that would indeed be insightful.

K5ARP, we love you

[Anonymous Coward]

All is forgiven. Come home.

Re:K5ARP, we love you

[HishamMuhammad]

First I see circletimessquare posting on Slashdot, and now K5ARP. WTF!? Apple goes Intel, Pink Floyd reunited, Sarge is released... K5 becomes the "other site"? Is the world truly coming to an end?

Re:K5ARP, we love you

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget CTS, the other day I even saw Baldrson and Rusty slug it out on /.!

Re:K5ARP, we love you

[Anonymous Coward]

One word for this: craptastic!

For the last 2 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I've felt that the perfect marriage would be Apple and Novell. Apple's Desktop products are great, but their server platform sucks. In comes Novell to provide their server platform. It makes perfect sense.

Re:For the last 2 years

[canuck57]

I've felt that the perfect marriage would be Apple and Novell. Apple's Desktop products are great, but their server platform sucks. In comes Novell to provide their server platform. It makes perfect sense.

No one has raised it yet, but perhaps Microsoft or IBM is going to buy Novell. Microsoft can see the writing, they know their market share in Asia isn't something they are going to publically announce any time soon. Or maybe IBM wants the OS in house?? Companies often cut even good people just before a takeover - get existing management to do the dirty work.

Too bad, I just started running Suse 10 and think it is a world class OS. Suse 10 could have gone the distance.

Re:Avoid disappointment

[rm69990]

Why would Red Hat kill Fedora? Name me one major company running Oracle on Fedora, or even on CentOS. And how exactly does Red Hat plan to kill off CentOS? Red Hat is just open sourcing yet again their last aquisition, certainly doesn't sound like their killing off anything.

Re:Avoid disappointment

[LnxAddct]

If memory serves, Debian is having problems of its own from the leadership down. Red Hat on the other hand has never been more successful. Red Hat has contributed more to the kernel than any other entity. They are responsible for getting SELinux integrated with the kernel. They maintain and enhance GCC, and glibc. They've given us so much from a directory server, to major enhancements in the desktop. They played a key role in getting OpenOffice.org a native interface, and they contribute code to Apache. The amount that Red Hat has contributed to the community is astounding and the list could go on for ages, lets not forget GCJ allowing java to run natively on linux (this is how openoffice.org and eclipse are included in Fedora). Unlike many other distros, Red Hat doesn't just repackage other people's work... they actually code alot of it themselves. The only reason that linux is enterprise ready is because of them, the only reason that the kernel has such a good security track record for getting patches out fast is because of Red Hat. They are taking linux into whole new directions by working on Xen and Stateless Linux. Through SystemTap, they are working on giving us the capabilities of Solaris' DTrace. I think you should think before you speak. Without Red Hat, OSS would be no where near where it is today. Oh and Fedora is more free than Debian (Fedora infringed not a single patent, which Debian does), so yea choose something really free and pick Fedora.
Regards,
Steve

Survey says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like a duck, tastes like a duck, sounds like every other duck before it... Yeahhhhhh.........

He's first

[imess]

Mantel's departure also comes less than a week after Novell announced a major restructuring that would result in 600 layoffs. ... and 599 more to come

I see now.

[Stumbles]

Lol. I think this sentence sums up what Novell refuses to acknowledge, plans to do, has made the decision which desktop they will officially support and why Hubert left;

"I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly. After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division."

TrollTech has made fantastic contributions.

[CyricZ]

You're the only one suggesting that they're dishonest. So that means you're wrong.

TrollTech has proven time and time again that they do truly care about the open source community. Even ignoring the fantastic contribution of the GPL'ed edition of Qt (on several platforms), they've made many contributions to the open source community. They have done significant work on KDE and Mozilla, for instance. The open source community would be far better off if there were more companies like TrollTech around.

Why is it that you hate TrollTech so much? It's obviously not because of their attitude towards the open source community, since they've been nothing but reasonable, and a gigantic help. Did their product allow a competitor to easily run you out of business? Did Qt render your Motif skills completely irrelevant?

Re:TrollTech has made fantastic contributions.

[markhb]

Having read the TrollTech pages, but not the actual Proprietary Qt license agreement as I didn't find it there, I agree with DAldredge's reading: TrollTech's own materials say that, if you're a for-profit company and aren't going to distribute your application as Open Source, then they want you to buy the license. If I were TrollTech and wanted to enforce that, then I would chase down a few companies who downloaded the GPL version from them (that's the catch that I'll get to in a minute), and ask their employees if they received (or could receive) the source code and redistribution rights to whatever in-house app was built with the GPL Qt. Given that in-house code (for companies that aren't in the software business) frequently contains things like embedded passwords and business rules that generally aren't shared with the rank-and-file, I would doubt that to be the case, and so the affected business may be in violation of the GPL. Businesses, especially those with enough money to be worth suing, don't like to play with things like that.

The catch seems to be this: TrollTech, as (if I understand correctly) sole copyright holder on Qt, has the right to distribute its own code as it wishes. It has every right to license its code as it wishes at any time, and, I would presume, to refuse to license it as well (see also BitKeeper). Others in possession of the GPL code, however, don't have the right to refuse anyone the Qt source code if they are distributing it at all... it has to be free to all comers. So, a business such as the one described above, which was willing to forsake the possibility of redistributing their in-house app under a proprietary license, could get the libs from a third party and go on their merry way.

In Solvat Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell exit you!

Kubuntu ain't half bad . . . but it's odd

[Phil Urich]

Personally, I've had quite a few problems with it. However, this isn't to say it's buggy. Actually, most of the problems were entirely my own fault. But the fact of the matter is, Kubuntu is a kindof weird derivation of a kindof weird distro. Not a bad derivation of a bad distro, just an odd one. So, firstly, it takes a bit of getting used to. Secondly, there are some things for which it's a bit more complicated to set up than you'd expect (a friend of mine is having some rather inexplicable problems setting up a website running from a copy of Kubuntu, for example).

That being said, even though I've personally been having some rather strange problems myself, I've stuck with it since overall it's one of the most attractive KDE-based distros out there right now. The Ubuntu base is pretty solid, and alot of the design decisions are kindof cool . . . just, yaknow, odd.

Re:Kubuntu ain't half bad . . . but it's odd

[CyricZ]

In what way is it "weird" or "odd"?

Re:Kubuntu ain't half bad . . . but it's odd

[Anonymous Coward]

(a friend of mine is having some rather inexplicable problems setting up a website running from a copy of Kubuntu, for example).

Yeah, something was messed up with PHP in Kubuntu 5.04. Had to remove and reinstall various web parts, then make symlinks. Maybe 5.10 fixes it. I have no idea why they shipped something that didn't serve PHP out of the box.

The main reason to use Kubuntu instead of SuSE is the upgrade path -- use Synaptic, clickety click, Debian package management just beats RPMs. The downside is it can be more of a pain hardware-wise. SuSE compiles every kernel module under the Sun and YaST handles hardware well. If your hardware is stable but your software changes a lot, Debian-based systems are much better. What we need is YaST or similar for hardware combined with Synaptic package management.

Re:Kubuntu ain't half bad . . . but it's odd

[CyricZ]

Maybe it's not a bad thing that PHP might not work with Kubuntu. PHP is known to be nothing but problematic, even for advanced users. As such, it is often the best tool when it is not used.

Anything that reduces the use of PHP is often very good for a systems security and performance.

Re:Kubuntu ain't half bad . . . but it's odd

[Phil Urich]

Hmm, this is a bit of a late response. Sorry about that, maybe you'll never see this. Anyways, there are quite a few ways in which Kubuntu is weird, other than a few superficial oddities caused by how KDE is a bit disjointed from the underlying distro (not to over-emphasize that: it's pretty well integrated, just not perfectly, but I read recently about commitments by the main Ubuntu people to making Kubuntu a full equal in quality, which is definitely a ringing endorsement and a good sign for future development).

Firstly, the lack of a root access (this of course comes from the original Ubuntu). Everything instead has to be done with sudo or kdesu. Okay, yes, you can still add a root user and then log into root, but then is when things start to get really odd and weird. Once a root exists, alot of the system settings (which all require then typing in a password) will not work, regardless of whether you type in the user's password (which is in theory what one has to do, since it's a sudo) or whether you type in the root. This goes on a bit, but the general point is that the overall behavior of the user and permissions is a bit odd. Actually, much of the stranger behaviour was fixed in the last round of updates, etc, but the point remains that the way that one is expected to work is different from most distros. I mean, the idea of not touching root and running everything from other users? Not necessarily bad practice, but quite different from most Linux distros and thus could be weird for some people.

There are a few other things (like how it automatically uses IPv6 by default when installing, so if you don't use the expert install you don't even know that it's using IPv6 . . . but there was a bug with Kubuntu until recently, or maybe still (I'm not sure if it has been fixed yet or not) that made IPv6 screw up things like incoming packets on port 80, hmm, I wonder what that might create issues with . . . a friend of mine had some issues there, let me tell ya) which are pretty much all trivial but also fall under a kind of strangely consistent quirkyness.

I hate to be repeating myself so much, but: don't get me wrong. I'm quite in love with it. Maybe all the quirks, and the quality time spent ironing them out, are helping the attraction? ;)

Re:Who cares?

[Rod Beauvex]

In all seriousness, is that not the point of Slashdot?

uptime uppity..

[Anonymous Coward]

i think this can be topped - a small frankfurt bank had until recently (vacating the building) an aix 4 server with a uptime of 1863 days...
makes me wonder if your building power is proper :-)

curse of Novell

[wardk]

It's the curse of Novell. over the course of their history they have been closely tied to many many failing disasters.

and who founded Caldera? and what are they now?

exactly

Let me say this in portuguese...

[Anonymous Coward]

Foda-se!

When you sell out, you should be ready for anything, like.. they *would* mostly likely screw you up, after all, they paid you for this. :-)

It shouldn't be difficult for him to find another job... ;-)

Zardoz

[snuf23]

Fix your sig, it's Zardoz not Zordoz.

Re:Zardoz

[johnnyR]

your right, thank you

There is a great disturbance in the Force

[zogger]

Seems like there might be a new KDE based distro coming down the pike soon. All those Novell/Suse/KDE folks getting laid off, the head cheese quitting... gee, what will they do with their "spare time" now?

Re:There is a great disturbance in the Force

[level_headed_midwest]

Go work for Microsoft?

How stupid to let go the founder!!!

[digitalsaf]

How stupid must be Novell to let go the founder of SuSE? The history showed that if the founder go away, the company is no more the company which has buyed Novell. So SuSE will go down. See Steve Jobs with Apple, a company without its founder or technical architect worth not a penny.

Re:How stupid to let go the founder!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The same happened with Florian La Roche (now RedHat) who helped bring SuSE to the front scene ... He leaved in 2000 or something like that .... and they survived quite well

Always Keep the Faith!

MaNU

Re:How stupid to let go the founder!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

when did Yoda join Slashdot?

Novell's leadership will kill the company

[Dano]

Obviously with such a non-political statement from the founder there was some serious fights going on within Novell's walls. This guy isn't just a somebody within SuSE, so obviously this is a huge loss for Novell. Imagine being a SuSE developer within Novell, hearing rumors opon rumors about fights, arguments and disagreements with top management, then seeing the founder of the one thing that's kept Novell in the papers lately walk in obvious total disgust.

This isn't the last important, caring person who'll walk from Novell. With their current leadership, history of screwing things up, inability to fully integrate as an Open Source company, and their botched relationships with their key management, it truly spells death for the company as long as their current "leadership" stays in power. In the end, it won't matter when there's noone left to show up and unlock the door.

Ximian does kernel stuff

[r00t]

Robert Love is in the Ximian part of Novell. He did DBUS and wrote a kernel internals book.

Re:Ximian does kernel stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter. I've been using SuSE since 5.0. 9.3 has been a great distro, very stable. I've just wasted several hours with 10.0 (the boxed version). SuSE 10.0 is a step backwards, it shouldn't have been released, it isn't ready. I've heard that the SuSE distro has been degrading since 9.3. Just downloaded my first Debian distro; bye-bye Novell, have fun. I've also spread the word among the dozen or so people who look to me for advice, they won't be using SuSE anymore either.

he is an entrepreneur

[wikinerd]

SuSE founder is an entrepreneur. I would do exactly the same if a big corporation was interested in my small company, id est I would just sell it away and then resign from the big corporation to do something else. Entrepreneurs don't like working as employees, because they want to feel independent. I knew that he was going to leave, and I think he was right doing so. Now he is free to start something new.

Re:he is an entrepreneur

[betasam]

Agreed that most Entrepreneurs would like to have more creative control of their own creations. But considering the number of years SuSE has been around in the past and the plans it has adopted in its growth, tools built, the AMD-SuSE collaboration, the huge KDE developer sustenance by SuSE over quite a long time, I would hardly believe that he's the "start something and move on" type. SuSE was also much larger than Novell's earlier acquisition "Ximian" who seem to be very much at home at Novell. This is definitely indicative of the lack of consensus between Novell's management and SuSE's traditional way of doing things. 600 Layoffs and a recent explanation that the intention was to "Managing Geeks as small teams" by Novell's CEO didn't seem quite a srong explanation. Layoffs are indicative of trouble with having running/working capital, after all a company is not too much more than the people who make it. Novell used a once "cash-rich" situation to go after acquisitions in a bid to stay competitive (or rather stay alive), perhaps the financials went too far on the wrong side of the balance sheet. On the other hand, I see this as a step by SuSE's CEO to show that he would probably try to float with the 600 who are probably SuSE employees in all likelihood and maybe start over, in which case - yes, his qualities of Entrepreneurship is showing up.

Re:he is an entrepreneur

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great german opportunity to restore the leadership on the linux desktop area for the EU.

OK Chicken Little [Re:get rid of linux]

[aergern]

Stop with the FUD.

In a nutshell, why is NetWare better than MS?

[Scott7477]

For those of us who are not network admins, could someone please explain what makes Netware so bulletproof relative to Microsoft servers?

Thanks...

Re:In a nutshell, why is NetWare better than MS?

[shadowd]

They are obviously not bulletproof or they would still be on top. They took too long to innovate after v3 but technologies like iPrint, iFolder and Server Clustering are still way ahead of MS' offerings. Novell Directory Service has been around since the early 90's (93?) - NT didn't see Active Directory until 2000?!!?

I don't know uptimes on current versions of NetWare/Open Enterprise Server but I've actually seen a NetWare 3 Server with over 7 years on the clock before we had to shut it down to move it and that was many years ago. NetWare did what it was supposed to do - it's still a great File & Print Server. Show me a Windows Print Server and I'll show you a lack of planning and an Administrative Nightmare...

Novell fell victim to a lack of foresight and a lack of Marketing. The Internet and the lack of applications on NetWare caused a serious downward spiral just when Microsoft was making inroads with NT.

NT was (is?) User Stupid - almost any moron could set up a Domain (broken or otherwise) without effort. To this day, I know techs that won't touch Linux or NetWare because it's "too hard"...

Re:In a nutshell, why is NetWare better than MS?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

To be expected

[invisik]

Most certainly this is not the company he founded 14-some years ago. They were bought out. It is good, however, he was polite on his exit and didn't badmouth whatever problems they are having at Novell. I'll be the first to admit, Novell has taken a lot time to realize they need to restructure around Linux and thank god they finally are, but you almost need to thank the current visionaries and put new ones in their place to start the new vision. Not the Ximian team, they also have their own vision for what things should be. They need some general open source/Linux people that can steer this thing and use the existing Novell service and partnership channels to execute it. It's really a good receipe overall, just poorly executed until recently.

I hope they can pull it off as SUSE is a great distro. The Open Enterprise Server is at about 60% strength of what it should and will be eventually. That is somewhat disapointing but they had to get something out there to start the transition (and again thank god a year early else they'd be dead right now with all the waiting). Everyone releases 1.0 products with limited features so we shouldn't be too hard on them--at least it's stable!!! I guess only time will tell.

NetWare is still a terrific product, too bad they can't reshell it, redo the myriad of management tools for it and rebrand it. It is so rock solid I hate to migrate people from it and get them going on reboots and all that. Competing products are good, but not quite that good. They could never release an open-source version of NetWare, but if they did I'd be all over that before this Linux stuff on the server.

In the meantime, I hope it doesn't tick off too many existing European core customers. Some have left, some stay, we'll just have to see.

-m

The problem is....

[10Ghz]

... That they had two Linux-organisations: Ximian and SuSE. SuSE had a top-notch distro, lots of expertise (both GUI, kernel and the overall system), great engineers, respectable revenues and profits (they were profitable IIRC) and lots of paying customers. Ximian had a so-so mail-client, Mono and some miscellianeous projects. I don't know about their revenues/profits, but they can't be that big.

So which of these organisations ended up calling the shots at Novell when it comes to Linux? Ximian, of course! And right from the start it seemed that Ximian's main product was FUD and vaporware.

I guess this is a case of brown-nosing and PR winning over great products and solid engineering.

Yeah, the investors are clamoring for cost cuts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember this article? It probably has much to do with this.

From the article -
"The pressure is growing on Novell Inc's management to make major strategic changes after a regulatory filing revealed a Novell shareholder has joined Credit Suisse First Boston in calling for change at the identity management and Linux vendor."

"...a call from financial analyst house Credit Suisse First Boston for Novell to improve its vision, strategy, and execution in order to become a more profitable business."

PHB -> English Translation - Cut R&D, sell off consulting arms, ZenWorks, Groupwise - i.e. turn us a quick profit by selling your gems so that we can then drop this hot potato and move on to our next investment if our "vision" doesn't quite pan out

Novell is going the way of HP it looks. Sad, as Novell really does have good products. I used to bash Novell till I worked in a 100 server Novell environment with NDS, before active directory copied it, and realized that long term planning and R&D is what makes Novell so worthwhile.

Open source has entered the equation and that's where the buzz is, so the MBAs are wondering why Novell is piddling around with all this legacy crap when they see companies like Red Hat making it big time off the Linux craze. Their following another bubble and these people are idiots.

Focus on customer needs through proper R&D rather than blind pursuit of particular technologies, and you'll outdo your competitors easy, the rest is marketing, where Novell actually does need help. It's all fine and good to adopt Linux, but without proper technical understanding those calling for restructuring will leave Novell seriously lopsided, and even worse, undifferentiated from others in the market.

We saw it all coming

[Qbertino]

Me, a year ago:
______
[Article: Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire SUSE]
I see three scenarios: (Score:4, Insightful)
by Qbertino (265505) on Tuesday November 04, @09:58AM (#7386243)
1.) Novell does a f*ck up with SuSE, goes down the drain and pulls SuSE along until they're bought out by somebody else. This is somewhat likely, as SuSE is doing very good as a Linux brand right now. It could hardly get better rather than worse. In germany (most Linux users per capita) SuSE is even synonym for Linux!
All in all that would stall Linux brand recognition but probably be good news for Mandrake, the last one left.

2.) Novell has actually seen the light and plans way ahead into the future, were software won't make a buck anymore, but free software will reign and the business is in services.

3.) Novell/SuSE twitches here and there, barely surviving, taking shares from Mandrake, they all die eventually, Mickeysoft prevails and there is a 5 year setback for OSS, with only Gentoo and Debian to the rescue in the far future, when the OSS model has consumed everything.

Bottom line:
I don't like this news. Sound bad. Chances are to high that this once o-so big company Novell is gonna screw up. And SuSE is my first recomendation to n00bs right now. It would be a real shame for them to go down the drain.
______

Looks like number one was a hit. Novell didn't see the light. The didn't plan ahead. They're visionless and now sqirming around probably just to prolong some classic VC money. I can just imagine the people involved summoning all efforts to pull their head out of the noose as we speak. They fallen for some hothead geeks and their buzz at Ximian as a last resort, but couldn't convey that spirit into a big business. Unlike Ximian - more or less a geeks workshop - SuSE was a *big* company with lots of disciplined fulltime professionals maintaining a frontline distro. The simple truth is that SuSE was a bigger Linux company than Novell will probably ever be, with one of the longest track records in the OSS industry. Novell on the other hand is just inflated stock and some karma and credit from a decade ago when they were big in the network business. Instead of throwing their marketing value behind SuSE and tuning low on the rebranding & bullshit strategy they did it all wrong. Nothing less than a major botch. Bad move, you stupid execs. No mercy here.

Note Number 3 above. This is what's actually going to happen. If Novell goes belly up, which I expect more than ever, that will be the end of commercial distros as we know it.

BTW: The current rise of Apple with their small, simple and cheap all-in-one appliances doesn't help the current situation for x86-OSS-as-MS-alternative either.

Lol what

[Anonymous Coward]

URL plz thx.

very sad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad we always here about stuff like this after it
happend. i'm sure we could have had a suse consumer
demonstration to safe herr gruender.
i really enjoyed suse (since 6.x. somehing) and
it's sad if the suse ideologie gets run over by
novell. novell is new to the linux market and they
should have shown more respect. my guess is that
the suse distribution is on a down-ward corporate america
mentality stall straight into the ground (though
i hope not...).
anyway, it's still easy to start new, eh
"yet another linux distribution" (YALD) ( maybe? :)
good luck!