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Novell's Linux Business Takes a Seat At the Grown-Up Table
CNet is reporting that while Novell still has a long way to go before they start making Red Hat nervous, they have at least gotten a seat at the grown-up table. Reporting 31% year-over-year growth in their Linux business, Novell attributes very little of this success to their Microsoft partnership, looking to their Redmond connection mainly for interoperability work. "Novell's core Linux business is growing. By 'core,' I mean that our non-Microsoft- related Linux business is growing. These are Suse Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions sold directly by the Novell sales force or by our channel partners, without any Microsoft certificates or Microsoft salespeople involved. However, the important thing is that our total revenue picture for Suse Linux Enterprise is growing, as our customers increasingly don't distinguish. As we've said before, Microsoft offers an alternate avenue for purchasing subscriptions but we are focused on growth of the whole category."
I was at Novell Brainshare this year and I can say firsthand that their commitment to open source seems genuine. I was impressed with the amount of work they are doing, not only moving to a Linux based platform and phasing out Netware as an OS altogether, but in taking their partners with them. There were some very good seminars on porting Netware applications to Linux, using the GNU tools like autoconf, and Linux security.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That being said, regardless if you like Novell or not, they contribute to some of the most important and popular projects for F/OSS that if you use almost any distribution, you are touching daily.
Your assessment of the situation is flawed and incorrect. Please see the following as some proof: http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/ http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/about_members.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._Novell http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=54 So... In summation, if you use the Linux Kernel, SAMBA, Gnome, KDE or any numter of other F/OSS products/projects...thank Novell for their contributions.
Well so far we are finding that the amount of maintainance is a lot, lot less. Whereas windows you have multiple install and reboots to set it all up, just turn on the suse update repos, and do a zypper up, and press y several times and bingo you have a patched os.
Also we are getting better uptime, those little "glitches" you get with windows. Not that they were a major things but annoyance.
More proof? We needed a new lookup only DNS server. So we dug out a low spec Dell box and used openseuse with yast to install the correct programs, and bingo, within an hour, we had one free, fast, functional dns server. No needing to find a key, or worse, trying to convince some jumped up rep that yes you really did purchase a Windows 2003 license, or even worse still , sorry we cant sell you w2k3 anymore, just windows 2008.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
In getting somebody on the phone, they are about a tie in time, but Novell edges them out in hold music.
In getting solutions, RH loves to point you to articles, Novell likes to get lots of logs, but goes a bit further sometimes. I have 2 stories to share on that.
At one prior company that switched from MS infrastructure servers to Linux, they moved from RHEL 3 to SLES 9 and 10 on VMware. I had an issue with logging into their servers via SSH using the company approved terminal program (not free, but oru version was not in support, being about 2 versions out of date. PuTTY worked fine.) After calling their support and escalating, their 2nd level guy said he'd call me back. A few hours later, having downloaded and installed the trial for the terminal program, he gave me the settings I had to change in the sshd_config to make it work.
At the same company as above, we had issues using SAMBA/Winbind to authenticate users to the server. It kept losing kerberos tickets in our environment. We sent various logs to them and finally were sent to 3d level support. They shortly sent us to engineering support and issued us a patch for "our" environment and told us to use this version of SAMBA and to email them when the next version alert for it was sent to us with the reference to this case so they could check the change logs and backport the fixes they had implemented when/if we wanted to upgrade.
Hell, I love their cool solutions pages and even use the novell docs sometimes to get things done on Redhat, due to their being more informative.