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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."
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.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
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.
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.