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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."
Go Novell. Competition = good
so that $367 million Microsoft paid Novell in 2007 alone had nothing to do with profitablity and growth. glad to hear it
We are late arrivals in linux land. However we are deploying a new suse server a week to replace NT servers. We have gone from zero to 35% in little over 3 months. It really is linux for the enterprise made easy. And whats even better, the toolsets are free, opensuse is free, and no shitty activation codes. It's all gravy, to use a bad term ;)
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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.
Fine - dislike the company, but you really need to get away from the FUD and the fear of microsoft and realize that they are doing nothing of the sort (subverting the open source community). you can hate mono, hate gnome, hate evolution, hate kde, you can hate opensuse/suse linux, whatever, but you can't say that novell hasn't done a lot for the community -- they've donated TONS of code (opened up all of SUSE Linux, app armor, yast, hula, etc. and have done tons to go after folks who try to hurt the community and/or open source (gifting patents to OIN, going after SCO, etc.).
stop pushing FUD and realize that they, just like other companies are in the business of making money and despite that, they continue to help the community. I'm not saying that I necessarily love their MS agreements either, but I don't think they're going to let MS poison open source and/or hurt the community...
appreciate your comments, but honestly am a bit sick of some of the novell bashing, most of which is based more on fear than on reality.
> Microsoft wants to hedge bets on many levels and getting any stream of income from open source would be good for them.
I don't think that is what the deal is about. Msft's business model does not work unless msft can control the standard. Msft wants linux to be legally encumbered. Msft is getting Novell to agree that all other version of linux are violating msft patents. This is supposed to create one legal version of Linux, and all the rest are illegal. Why do you think msft is sponsoring the Acacia lawsuit against Redhat?
Right now, there is no way msft can kill off linux in the same manner that msft has killed off msft's proprietary competitors. But, if there is only one linux, and this linux is commercial product, then it becomes much easier for msft to kill off, or at least contain the problem.
Novell execs do what novell execs think is in their own best interest. Sometimes that means helping Linux/foss, other times not. Novell execs may presently wants to linux to succeed - but only for novell, not for everybody. Bottom line, novell execs are looking at their own bottom line - whether that helps, or hurts, linux is inconsequential. Novell execs are not in business for the sake of any kind of idealism.
Whatever criticisms people have against msft, you have to give msft credit for being strategic. Right now, msft is teaming with novell to defeat redhat via msft's patent scam. Once redhat has been defeated, msft can turn their attention to other linux distributors, including novell. Let me remind you, msft has a long history of turning against their business partners.
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.
Do you remember the days when any company that stroke a deal with Microsoft, died a horrible and agonizing death? Well, look at this deal with Novell: it seems this is the first time a company pulled a fast one - on Microsoft! Novell saw a small opportunity to make a bit of money and offered to Microsoft something Novell must have known is worthless and impossible: the proprietarization of Linux. Microsoft was desperate enough that it wanted to believe this baloney and Novell was more than happy to oblige and feed them the BS, making a few bucks in the process, and attracting (extremely few) additional customers. Not too much profit, but every little helps, and you won't spit on it, especially if you give NOTHING in return, like Novell did to Microsoft.
Microsoft is getting sloppy and silly. These are indeed new times.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.