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Novell Story Site Launched
An anonymous reader writes "Novell launched a Linux/Open Source story page where everyone can briefly describe how he/she helps pushing Linux or Open Source forward. For every submission a marker is set on a world map. You can also win prices, among them, although yet not mentioned on the page, 50 SLED 10 licenses."
I LOVE winning prices. They are my favorite.
I hope Novell has plenty of moderators.
Just what I need, more prices.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
And of course the way a viral campaign really spreads is if you tell people. So if you feel this is important to promote and you want it to get more press, then write about it on your blogs.
No, I don't work for Novell, but I am involved in advertising and viral advertising in particular and I'm hoping that by explaining how we can harness this, people won't just jump down their throats and start bitching out all advertising in general, and slashvertising etc.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I suppose it'a a good thing to have everyone able to see each other's progress and direction... I'm surprised in retrpspect that this didn't happen sooner.
> The odds of winning a prize depend upon the total number of eligible entries received. Nice way of saying that to max your chances, do not advertise this site.
blow your mind already
right here
nobody here is really interested in renting (aka licensing) their OS
i have a licence for my driving, one for my dog and my pet fish eric but i also need one to run my computer ? no thanks
I help Linux by purchasing and promoting Microsoft products.[/sarcasm]
I'm absolutely _loving_ the irony of an "Open Source" company giving away licenses of their proprietary software as prizes. Way to hold up the ideal, guys!
It is still not fully functional. I can't make it understand a non-US zip code or city/country combination.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Novell run out of ideas what to do for Linux? I have a simple idea: Listen to your customers and fire technology pushists like Nat Friedman. In fact it is Novell which fucked up our SuSe distribution and key Suse specialist were laid off, technology no one requested like Red Carpet broke stability and the KDE support, SuSe's great advantage was disrupted be the strange push for Gnome. No wonder when people like Friedman become desktop strategists. Listen to your customers, ask them what they want. Not: Listen to your managerial staff and the solutions they prefer and impose them on your userbase. It is possible that SuSe could regain its reputation. But users are fed up with Novell.
OK, we have a contest for people who contribute to open source software, and the prize is a license for proprietary closed-source software. What's wrong with this picture?
You need a license for your pet fish eric and you wouldn't need one to run your computer?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
My name is Chris and I am an open source contributor...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Well, I tried the signup but to my surprise "England is not a recognised country". Even though I picked it from their drop down box and it was quite clearly visible and zoomed in on the map.
All right, Novell, here's my contribution to Open Source and Suse in particular:
I just tell everyone to get rid of the zen/zmd crap and install Smart ( http://labix.org/smart ). This way, they can also enjoy one of the best distributions available today, only held back by your stupid screw-ups.
If all of the stories were written in the style of a Penthouse Forum letter.
...underdog.
Those of you who remember the last "big" campaign from Novell to promote its Netware platform recognize this.
www.whytheylie.com
This was a Novell domain dedicated to telling the world how Microsoft lies in order to steal marketshare away from Novell, or misrepresents its own or Novell's products to the same end. Even if you agreed with the general sentiment Novell was trying to express on that site, it still came off as shrill and overwrought. "why they whine" would have been more a more accurate tag.
Currently, that marketing campaign is dead, thought he domain still resolves to a 404 on Novell's site.
This new campaign sounds like another example of self-defeatism. This from the company that had the network operating system locked down and became a footnote in that market within ten years. This from the company that had the rights to the Unix OS after their buyout of Unix Systems Labs. It had the keys to the kingdom and knew not what to do with them...
So now Novell wants you to advertise for them by evangelizing for the open source movement, which is something that OS evangelists really don't need Novell's embrace or help to do successfully. Novell is grasping at straws.
But this reminds me of those times when Mandrake had to beg for donations. Not quite in the same ball park just yet, but it doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in me about their direction. This is the sort of thing I might expect from a non-commercial project, not from a company.
Ubuntu has something like this here
However, you won't win any prices, so you won't have to pay
It is only "bad" when it is based upon lies of FUD.
.... yeah, that's dumb.
This attempt at "viral marketing" is stupid because your chance of winning anything DECREASES as it spreads.
Not to mention that they really need different levels of participants. If Linus enters his story, but all the prizes go to people who "evangelize" Linux
For a couple of years EUGLUG was able to get SuSE to send us remaindered boxed sets to hand out at the Community Village in the Oregon Country Fair, one release earlier than what was then current. A good deal, hardcopy manuals and the just past state of the art SuSE CD distros to pass out to random hippies.
In 2004 we went back to burning our own, Somebody in Oakland dropped the ball during the merger (likely the Oakland office closed).
Last summer and this we got Ubuntu, as many as we wished.
Well, we're happy. Cold day in Hell before I'll mention this on their site, though.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Several people have commented on SLED being proprietary. Amid this firebranding, I ask you to consider some details about SLED, SUSE, and Novell. 1. Open Source SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop was developed in open source. It includes a couple pieces of proprietary software from partner companies, such as the Macromedia Flash plugin for Firefox, RealPlayer, and Adobe Reader. It includes no proprietary kernel modules. Andreas Jaeger recently posted on SUSE's policy here. Novell includes a couple proprietary packages developed at Novell on the SLED10 media, but they do not install by default, and are all related to integrating with enterprise infrastructural services (already-deployed Novell enterprise systems). 2. Free Software, but Not Free Updates SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is fully functional free software. It does not require any kind of license key. However, Novell hopes to make revenue on the software update service, as well as enterprise support, consulting, training, and other services. The activation keys activate the update service for one year. (Clever winners of the 50 1-year activations that we are giving away might extend that a bit by using the 60 day eval before they use their activation code.) 2. Free Updates? Yes, for openSUSE. Novell also underwrites another desktop distribution openSUSE, which includes a lot more packages than SLED. Anyone can download it and use it. However, SLED today has some features that were (thankfully) not included in openSUSE 10.1, the current version. (In fact, we had a major screw up with a including a not-ready component in openSUSE, causing a mess that we are still trying to clean up in the SUSE community.) The feature delta with SLED, as well as the extensive extra polishing that SLED received before shipping--have prompted many people in the community to expressed their desire to use SLED. They like what Novell has created and packaged--an amazingly well-assembled desktop system, and they would rather not wait for many of the features and design elements to appear in openSUSE 10.2. 3. Novell Contributes...a Lot Please give Novell some credit for driving many of the great Linux features that have shown up not only on SUSE Linux, but many other distributions. Novell hired David Reveman to complete his work on Xgl & Compiz, which are now available on Ubuntu, Gentoo and other distros. Novell hired Aaron Bockover to create Banshee on the Helix framework so that we could have legal mp3 on Linux. Novell bought Ximian and continues to enable them to create things like the new main menu for GNOME (Jimmy Krehl's "slab"), and solid desktop search well ahead of Microsoft Vista (which still may not ship with that feature). A major reason why plug and play devices like USB drives, mp3 players and cameras just work today is Robert Love's project Utopia. SUSE engineers today are pushing upstream Linux kernel code that has been and still is greatly extending battery life. Maybe these examples are still too self-interested? Novell employees the team that maintains GCC, which is a 100% upstream contribution the GNU toolchain, and yields zero competitive advantage to Novell. Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe has stated the reason: you can't just take, you gotta give back. That's why Novell is participating and contributing. Novell is part way through a cultural change that I think is nothing short of astounding. Say what you want about our marketing missing the mark. But if you believe that we are too proprietary, or that we do not actively engaged enough in open source, then tell us why you think so. Otherwise, is it really justified to berate Novell for being proprietary just because we have offered 50 update activation keys on an awareness campaign? Please refer people to this comment if you see accusations of SLED being proprietary. -- Ted Haeger (You can find me at http://reverendted.wordpress.com./
http://www.novell.com/linux/yourlinuxtour/
I don't know when the mapping thing was set up, but I imagine it's got something to do with the Roadshow - getting an idea of how many people would attend, perhaps?
There aren't many people (maybe 6?) around my city (Dallas, TX) that are mapped.
Here, we call it Occupied Normandy.
I tried SLED 10. It's buggy as get out.
Too slow. Clunkly navigation. High noise to information ratio
The MS "no sue/patent deal" with Novell/Xandros is like the Pope blessing a Jewish wedding
Hello Ted,
I'm just another opensuse user (actually I'm relatively recent user having avoided SUSE for years due to the inability to download the ISOs for free). As I'm an administrator of a few (60+) opensuse desktops too, I'm going to guess that the not-ready component you included was novell-zmd right? That thing is painful... Is it as slow for you as it is for me? Why does it go to sleep? People who think yum is slow should give this thing a whirl just after boot... Plus I never thought I'd say this but I'm glad that yast was around or I would have struggled to fetch those updates (yeah I know - fetch the RPMs and update like the bad old days)...
It has to be said that your company is doing some extremely interesting (well to me) work. Little things like the opensuse firefox print dialog displaying CUPS printers (yes I know about the bug where if a printer disappears it makes firefox crash when you go to the print dialog but so do your folks because I found it in your bugzilla). Other things like the ability to delegate the ability to install and update software to a user are absolutely fantastic at a site like the university where I work. I have been enjoying using XGL (although it took a bit of futzing with config files to get it going under KDE which is what we are still using here and why oh why did you change the way the zoom keybinding worked? We had folks who loved the way the zoom stuck because it acted like a magnifying glass that you didn't have to hold...). Our laptop users like the NetworkManager setup although I suspect getting the Wifi to work with the University's PPTP VPN is still going to be a step too far. I even noticed that OOo started much faster than I'd ever seen it in other distros (although I do now see there is some sort of autoloader). Global proxy configuration is also good.
However there are a couple of gotchas like gaim always using a proxy for jabber (!) if a global proxy is set (already known to your folks), the mysterious and yet repeated kmail crashes that I keep having (I haven't had a chance to look that one up) and the bizzare choice to pull up the current kernel when a new kernel is installed (this led to USB harddisks no longer working in the running kernel and has now scared users off applying updates).
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, you do seem to include a lot of closed stuff in your distro but for the most part people seem to want it (acrobat, realplayer and flash are all popular and the sneaky packaging of a 32 bit firefox side steps the 64 bit owners wrath for now). Your documentation isn't bad (the wiki is somewhat useful on issues like packaging). However what you are doing with SLED (and indeed Opensuse) feels remiencient of Red Hat do with their RHEL which in my book is the right way to go. So long as the SRPMs for the open source parts and you don't start bundling closed source drivers (keep 'em as a seperate download) I feel branding it as wholely proprietary is unfair.
My colleague Richard Guenther from the GCC team has requested a correction. I said: "Novell employees the team that maintains GCC, which is a 100% upstream contribution the GNU toolchain, and yields zero competitive advantage to Novell." My mistake was that Novell does not house the actual GCC maintainers. It should read: "Novell employees a teams to contribute to GCC, which is an upstream contribution the GNU toolchain and yields little competitive advantage to Novell." --Ted