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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."
What is the "too late for me" in reference to? TFA give no clue.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
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..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Could Hubert Mantel have quit due to Novell making SuSE a GNOME-centred distro instead of keeping it a KDE-centred one?
/ 1620206&tid=223&tid=106
Novell standardise on GNOME: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/05
I am for one...
I love Suse. It's my favorite distro by far.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
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.
Who is it unclear to? And what are they smoking?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
When we took away his stapler. That just pissed him off.
'tis but a scratch.
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)...
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.
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.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
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.
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).
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
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!
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
/ Sorry, SuSE's restructuring supposed \ /
| that chamaleon got fired. Get used to |
| me: the more efficient, featureful |
\ allmighty and POSIX compliant Clippy!
\ ____
\ / __ \
\ O| |O|
|| | |
|| | |
|| |
|___/
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.
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.
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.
"MY APOCALYPTIC TENOR HAS NOT BEEN DISPELLED!" - T-Rex, qwantz.com
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.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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.
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!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
Silly mods. That should be +1 Funny, not +1 Insightful. *sigh*
someone better fork (open)suse as soon as possible before it dies with novell...
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.
This guy is way out there
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!
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.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
So long and thanks for all the SuSE!
(Apologies to both NOFX and the late Douglas Adams)
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
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." ???
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.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
oh i have seen plenty of good set up netware servers.. my personal favorite is
o vell_server_discovered_after/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_n
(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..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
for some reason i wish that was posted on the front page as a link.. just so we could slashdot it.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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'
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?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
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.)
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.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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
I am using their solutions because they are the best for my needs.
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.
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.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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?
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?
The filesystem is the package manager
Robert Love is in the Ximian part of Novell. He did DBUS and wrote a kernel internals book.
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.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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.
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.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
*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.
... 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.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca