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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.'
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'
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?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.