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Novell Still Runs Windows
daria42 writes "Despite Novell's internal migration to Suse and OpenOffice.org, the company admitted today that up to 3000 of its 5000 workers still had dual-boot installations with Microsoft Windows. These users are likely to be migrated to pure Linux boot systems in the next year or so." From the article: "Hovsepian's remarks indicate Novell will have at most a few months' experience as a complete Linux and open source desktop shop behind it when, according to the vendor's predictions, the software starts taking off in the mainstream." Update: 04/11 13:25 GMT by J : At the closing OSCON session, August 5, 2005, Miguel de Icaza talked about Novell's progress. My notes read: "novell's moving 5500 employees from windows to linux. first stage, office->openoffice, is complete. second stage, windows->linux, is 50% complete, proj. 80% by Nov."
and still not laid...
Since a fair wodge of Novell's money comes from selling Windows software, I comfortably predict that this won't happen any time soon.
I work for Novell, and of course I have a windows machine. I develop software that has to run on Linux, OS X and Windows. All of our developers are in the same boat. If they don't have Windows code, they have NetWare code that needs to be built on Windows. Very few developers don't have code that needs a Win32 box either for development or for testing.
But ask me what machine I use to read my email, surf the web, write code, etc. It's my Linux box. And most of the developers on my team are the same way. And Novell as a company has been WAY better than anywhere else I have worked about having every business app I need on Linux supported by the IT department, and I even used to work for a company whose main business was their Linux distro (no, it wasn't SuSE).
Novell's shift from Windows and Office to open source software was first begun in March 2004, while microsoft's honey pot was only released on the 3rd of this year?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
They make Windows sound like a controlled substance. "Oh man, we're working night and day to get these employees off such a nasty habit. Please don't let this affect your opinion of Novell as a Windows-free workplace."
Windows is a million times less addictive than nicotine. I kicked the habit on my personal computers in junior high while my peers were just *starting* to smoke.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
You're trying to tell me that a large corporation with 5000 desktops, who develops Windows software might run Windows on a lot of them? I'm shocked I say, shocked.
-- Linux user #369862
However, Linux is closer to desktop readiness this year than ever before.
The only reason that Linux isn't viable on the desktop is because Microsoft locks people into their proprietary standards. If you have a bunch of documents in MS Office, or you exchange documents with those who use MS Office, then you can't really get rid of it. You can't expect OO.o to be 100% compatible because they had to reverse engineer the file format, and there's no way to get it right. Microsoft can't even stay compatible with itself across versions, how is OO.o supposed to get it right? Same thing goes for many other things locking people in, like Exchange to name one. The software on Linux is great, and would be a lot better if we didn't have to spend half our time reverse engineering Microsoft's file formats, and implementing proprietary extentsions that Microsoft has wedged into the few standards it chooses to even recognize.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
*nix has been managable across a network longer than Windows has even known what a network is. *nix was designed with the network in mind...
We've just had a vendor pitchfest for a replacement OS for an elderly unsupported RH release in use on about 4000 servers (my employer's a dotcom with piles of machines in many remote datacentres round the world.) We've had Sun pitching Solaris, Red Hat on RHEL and Novell/SuSE. I must say the Novell/SuSE pitch was the most unexpectedly impressive; Crispin Cowan's AppArmor is really, really good (I'm biased: I'm a security geek) and seems to be much more usable than SELinux. Xen also seems to be happier on SuSE than RH.
Sun had a good story now they can say Solaris is really Free, but they seemed very defensive (spent 30 mins showing us balance sheets marked "Sun confidential, internal use only" emphasising they make lots of money and aren't about to go bust. But we would definitely be a relatively small customer for Sun, whereas I'm more convinced that Novell would be prepared to go the extra mile to keep us happy.
Personally I'm going to be trying SLES out on at least one machine at home, alongside OpenBSD and Mandriva, regardless which OS our beancounters plump for.
Face facts folks, Linux still isn't ready for the desktop, and Novell, despite their loads of marketing, knows it.
If Linux isn't ready for the desktop, there's no such thing as "ready for the desktop". I see absolutely NO criteria of "desktop readiness" that (a)applies to Windows, (b) doesn't apply to Linux and (c) is an attribute solely of the operating system.
Where Linux adopters run into trouble is C. The problem is what economists call "network effects": if you need software X, and provider of X only targets Windows, then you need Windows.
The point of a company like Novell migrating to Linux is to help create a Linux market for X, or its competitor X'. But until X or X' is available on Linux, then you're stuck with dual boot.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Novell is a company that develops Windows products, as well as Linux and Netware. They are ALWAYS going to have Windows workstations there. We have a number of Novell DSEs at our company and they ALL run NLD or Suse 10 on their work laptops, and use Vmware to run Windows as needed.
Other Novell support staff needs Windows boxes around to support customers.
I don't think it's possible for them to be 100% Windows free. Their business demands that they run some Windows boxes.
I find it quite ambiguous when people debate whether Linux is "desktop ready" or not. What does that mean? I have the notion that it means something different to everyone. I've been exclusively running Linux on my desktop for over 3 years, and exclusively on my laptop for over one year. I have a Linux system at my workplace, and so does almost everyone else on my floor. Are there occasionally problems with running Linux on my desktop (including problems related to the fact that I'm not running Windows)? Yes, of course there are. The amount of problems may decrease, but will never be fully eliminated (IMHO). I can usually find a detour or alternative to the problems that I face now though, so its not a huge deal. And I can state for a fact that the amount of time I spend fixing problems with my Linux desktop is much less than the amount of time I used to spend solving similar problems on my former Windows machine.
:p
So I consider Linux is already "desktop ready" for me. I think that for the most part, regular people can do just fine if Ubuntu or another user-friendly distro is completely setup for them and they are given maybe a 30-minute tutorial on how to access the web, e-mail, etc. So who are we talking about here? Who does Linux have to be "ready" for to be called desktop ready? Those idiots that call in to tech support asking which key is the any key? The elderly who don't even know what a mouse is? Or just your normal, average computer user? And if so, who is a normal, aveage computer user anyway?
Sorry for the early morning rant, but this term has been bothering me for quite some time.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
I can see why they haven't migrated yet. There are a few business apps, mostly vertical applications for ticketing, billing and invoice, that need to be run on Windows. For instance, where I work, we use a proprietary ticketing system that is unlikely to be ported to anything that isn't Windows. It enters problems on a customer's account, and assigns the problem to the appropriate technician, who then updates the ticket as needed.
But here's the deal... for all of its slowness, awkward GUI implementation, dubious reliability and stratospheric license and support contracts, all it really does is read and update database records. It's a LAMP application with out the L, A or P.
Here's a bigger deal... almost all vertical client/server apps can be replaced by a web-based application. Almost all of them do nothing but update and display database records.
Why not just hire a full-time RoR geek or two to crank out LAMP applications that will be robust, secure, customizeable to meet coprorate standards, easy to deploy and dirt cheap compared to a multi-zillion dollar per-seat license?
Why not indeed.
This is where the new growth in the IT industry is headed. Already, most of the tools I need to interact with the vast and varied store of corporate data are web-based utilities. Admittedly, I work on the technical side of a major ISP, and we tend to be more elightened about such things, but really... Linux on the desktop will be a reality sooner rather than later.
The trick isn't porting applications to the Linux desktop, but to the Linux server.
There are likely some departments within Novell that still are dependent on Windows for third party apps. Like an accounting or payroll department perhaps. Are there enterprise level Linux apps that would support them? Not trying to flame. Just a question.
The oft-hyped training issue is a complete myth in my experience.
My parents (age 70+) are happily running Fedora Core 5. training was neglible. They e-mail, surf, and play games with no problems at all.
My present company is completely linux-based using thin-clients. Training issues? None, nada. Complaints? None, nada. No issues teaching people to use Linux, no issues teaching people to use OpenOffice.org, or Gaim, or Evolution, or any of the other applications we use.
We are a medical facility. Our staff are trained to treat patients and are by no means computer people. They just want the computer to work so that they can get their jobs done. And you know what? That's exactly what it does.
Linux is not perfect, but neither is Windows. Each is better at some things than the other. Your comments are simply ignorant.
Just because Novell is offering Linux doesn't make it heresy that they have boxes with Windows dual-booted. If they've already bought their licences for Windows, MS is already paid. Not exercising the licences they own out of protest isn't going to make a dent. Meanwhile, their devs need to be able to run stuff on Windows, so it kinda makes sense that they have Windows at their disposal.
Speaking as someone who lost a number of potentially productive days trying to get Windows 2000 SP4-slipstreamed to install on a 250G harddrive without crapping out at boot-time when it saw a partition beyond the 128GB barrier, Linux is looking better every day. In fact, after spending five minutes in Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSE, the chameleon won and is now installed on my hda4. But I still need Windows to run a few things...yes, mostly games, and a few college websites that just have to have IE6. But I already own Win2K, and I'd be silly not to use it just because MS is an idiot sometimes.
Keeping Windows around for the things Windows is good at makes my computer more powerful. I don't support MS, but I'm not going to rend my nose to spite Bill's face.
Windows, or at least, the Microsoft Operating System, is never going to go away. If Linux seriously erodes Microsoft's position, they'll sink their pentillions of dollars into making a solid, quality, viable OS product. So don't mind Novell, or myself, for installing SuSE and Windows next to each other. You need not be a zealot or a martyr to be a soldier.
I know you're trolling but you're obviously not very knowledgeable in business. It doesn't have to be the year of Linux for Novell to make millions. And guess what? We still haven't had "the year of Linux" and Novell is making millions! In the last year they've signed with a few governments. That alone is enough to drive the company for years. They have plenty of customers. In the last years they've had bigger problems with management than linux, IMO.
Developers: We can use your help.
This is only another proof that successful companies don't waste money on removing facilities that are no longer useful but don't get in the way.
An emerging migration strategy from Windows to Linux is
Oh wait... you know that. You're only trolling, right?
[too early-- need more coffee...]
Er... mysterious apps? Just because you don't know of any doesn't mean they don't exist. For example:
AutoCAD - yup, very mysterious this...
StruCAD / XSteel - not quite so well known pretty much the only choices for 3D detailing in this industry.
On top of that we've got our CAD/CAM control software, can't see us moving to a Linux version of that. You need dedicated software to run well over £600,000 worth of machinery, taking data from the above packages. Can't see that running on anything but Windows for the forseeable future.
Until wine is in decent shape, it is pointless to approach general public to switch. While it will never run 100% of the applications,
it is not necessary. It just a larger fraction of the applications than it currently does.
Having said I was surprised to see how far it has come. I tested several niche applications used in the insurance industry with codeweavers. None of them had a problem. While I am not ready to recommend wine as an option in our company, I have a hope that
in future it can become a reasonable recommendation.
I wonder if they are generating a report of the migration (positives and negatives).
And if so, will they publish it?
On a computer or under a hood.
Having said that, the transition at Novell had its high and low points. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the services on the company intranet shifted from supporting WIndows/IE only to generic browsers. I was disappointed in the quality of the GroupWise client on Linux (not that I was wild about the Windows version...), and the lukewarm support for the Evolution client on the GroupWise servers.
Oddly, the thing that made the Linux move easier for me than many of my co-workers was the fact that I am an OS X user by preference. Of course, the terminal was not a mystery, and I was more accustomed to accepting that similar things are sometimes managed very differently on different platforms.
One constructive criticism I would leave Novell with is that they could learn a lot from Apple about making *nix palatable to the desktop user (specific example: printing), but, from where I sat, it seemed as though Apple was completely invisible to Novell.
when I worked there 2 years ago, I wasn't dual boot. I just had 4-7 machines all the time with a kvm. I always had at least one windows machine depending on what I was doing, but the good hardware was always running linux. The culture there seemed to be: "MS took our lunch money years ago, and now we're going to face them armed with very little, but at least we're going down swinging." Of course some of the most accomplished technical people that made Netware what it was are long gone, but there are competent people still there.
this sig is deprecated
The migration away from Windows and Microsoft Office was always a phased approach.
Office --> Open Office first (Novell is now standardised across the company on OpenOffice 2.0)
Windows --> Linux workstations for those that can; based on business function, application needs and the 'savviness' of the user
Right now I'd say that a large proportion of development, test and technical people are using Novell Linux Desktop as their primary desktop. I can see this just by working with people in meetings.
I can't comment on the overall number of people using single boot Linux, dual boot or just Windows; all I can share is what I see - lots of people using Linux on a daily basis.
The next phase is 'filling the gaps' - seeing how knowledge workers and those with specific applications can move. The release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in mid-year should help with a lot of these issues.
Remember - just like any project choose the visible, realistic goals - that's what Novell's IS&T team have done.
Evil ZEN Scientist
Novell uses Novell ZENworks Linux Management internally to provide updates and patches to servers and desktops running Linux.
http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/linuxmanag ement
for details.
Evil ZEN Scientist
But how are Novell's middle managers going to play with their Gantt charts from Microsoft Project?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
You havent seen the latest bundle. It's called the Open Workgroup Suite, and it includes SLES, Open Enterprise Server (Linux version, but there is also pricing for the NetWare version), GroupWise, ZEN Suite (manage Windoze and Linux workstations and servers), SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and support for OpenOffice.org on Windows (so you can have a mixed deployment). The pricing on it hasn't been announced, but it's in the $100 - $150 / user ballpark.
/
Check it out here http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite
For my money, that's way cheaper than a MSFT solution, plus it's got a ton of open components in there.
TT
See... and you thought your sig was boring - TT
Quote from the pricing and announcement:
"The Novell Open Workgroup Suite includes the Linux* version of Novell Open Enterprise Server, Novell GroupWise® for Linux, Novell ZENworks® Suite, SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop and the popular OpenOffice.org. Pricing is $110 per device/user for a perpetual license and $75 annually for software maintenance."
Evil ZEN Scientist