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Novell, Dell Face Delisting From NASDAQ
narramissic writes to tell us that Novell has confirmed receiving a delisting notice from the NASDAQ stock exchange, after the software company delayed filing its most recent quarterly report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Dell is in the same position. Both companies, and others including Apple, are grappling with investigations of the way they issued stock options and — in Dell's case — other accounting irregularities. Both companies are appealing the delisting, which means they won't vanish from the stock exchange anytime soon. NASDAQ rules require listed companies to announce the receipt of a delisting notice.
Netware is dead but OpenSuSE is still kicking. Although I'm thinking about switch to Ubuntu.
They are still around. We use them here at the New Mexico Child, Youth and Family Development Department. It's actually one of the main reasons we managed to convince our management to go open source. Novell bought SuSE Linux, and we got 50 free SuSE Linux Enterprise Server licenses with full support. Now most of our back end stuff runs on SuSE. We still use Novell file and print servers, though.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I also work with some companies that don't get rid of software and I have a a few hundred clients still using ccmail, yep ccmail. And a bunch of those on Novell 3/4 servers (yep 3.12 still survives). It aint broke and they havent fixed it, but at some time I keep telling them those servers will finally go down and they will break and they will have to fix it.
Example, have one client running a ccmail network on a NT cluster on servers that have to be 1996? That is an example of how to run a network on 5 cents a day. coarse then it breaks and then it costs you $250,000 a day in losses, but some people just don't understand that.
Well its not illegal (and i agree with informaing the stock holders makes it legal) at the moment. Odds are it will be very soon, but saying that, all the companys I follow didn't inform their investors, so they broke the rules. A few smart ones, made a quick change to their output to investors at the beginning of the year to squeeze it in, but again.. I wasnt informed when they actually did it.
so as a stock holder, Im highly annoyed that i had to buy stck at actual market prices.
But there isn't any real reason for netware to break. Yes you may have to replace hardware but there really isn't any good reason that server can not run 10 or 20 years. The problems will be getting spare parts.
I find it funny that people think that if it isn't new it must be replaced. As long as you can get replacement parts for the hardware it should be work for a very long time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
well ok think of it this way.
/Rant
Your a public company, with employees, and stock holders, and various other things that you HAVE TO work to maintain a good corporation for.
You then decide on the risk of using software that IS NOT supported, and in many cases, the company who wrote it is 5-10 years out of business. Now what is the risk of hardware failure when you you probably dont even have all the hardware or software diskettes (CDs werent even used back then) to reproduce the hardware or drivers or software on another server?
ok you accept the risk? Fine its a risk and acceptable, but did you inform the board of directors who might then need to inform all the employees, stockholders, investors, and all of the people who it is their duty to inform, that if the software or hardware goes down, you could lose your XXXX database and that whole business process for XX amount of days and the information might not be recoverable?
Risk is risk and I understand not spending money if the risk is offest by price (say upgrading from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003, for alot of people, not worth the cost). BUT if you do not first make an informed decision and only think Money, then do not inform those who also have to take the risk into consideration. Then you are endagering your stockholders or worse your employees might not have a job next week. That is not a risk assessment, that is a person who is endangering a greater group of people. There are many of them out there, in 15 years of consulting i have seen dozens, if not more.
And isn't that the whole gotcha of the Title of this article in the first place? Informing people about how you do things and the decisions you make. Be it giving away stock or maintaining a decade over peice of software or hardware... Have you truely informed and taken a good risk assumption?