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Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
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it does look like redhat has won
Posted Oct 24, 2005 22:56 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
maybe it was their head start in the linux market....maybe they just have a better sales force...but every time i hear of new large contracts being awarded, i tend to hear redhat's name more than i hear novell's.
redhat has many advantages:
- redhat is not tied to an old cash cow that distracts the sales force from pushing new products. novell's existing codebases appear to form the bulk of their revenue, which means the salesforce is still pushing it.
- redhat does not have a confusing product line - its pretty much rhel and the support contracts for it. novell has novell desktop linux and suse pro. i cannot figure out how they market these products and i suspect many other people can't either. suse has no presence in the north american market. if they insist on keeping the name, it should be for europe only.
- redhat is not hitching its wagon to dead projects from unwise acquisitions. i am talking about mono and ximian. from what i can tell all ximian has brought to the table is pedigree and a lot of great blog posts. the world does not care about dotnet compatibility...maybe this was in the air at one point but that train has left the station. the new "platform" is the web, not a vm runtime and api.
- redhat seems to have gotten the jump on opensuse with fedora, from what i can tell commands a much larger market in early adopters.
it does look like redhat has won
Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:11 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]
While I'm not big fan of mono I can say it's good stuff and Novell does not spend too much resources on it: RedHat is pushing GCJ and this is effort of roughly the same order. And I'm not sure we'll forever use web-architecture: it's ugly, slow and inefficient, *VM is much better. Unfortunatelly both Sun and Microsoft are trying to control *VM-approach (Java in Sun's case, .NET in Microsoft's case) totally so of course open architecture wins.
RedHat is just smaller and faster, Novell plays catch up so far, that's all. We'll see what happens.
it does look like redhat has won
Posted Oct 25, 2005 4:03 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
>> RedHat is pushing GCJ and this is effort of roughly the same order.
redhat can afford it, they aren't the ones with shareholders demanding action.
>> and I'm not sure we'll forever use web-architecture: it's ugly,
its as ugly as your widget set and native browser, which is the same level of beauty and/or ugliness you will get from tools binding the widgetsets locally.
>> slow and inefficient, *VM is much better
the speed of the network is constant across any app.
and whether you think running apps on vms as opposed to apps via markup is better, it doesn't matter, the web audience is 500 million users.
It ain't over till the fat lady sings
Posted Oct 25, 2005 8:17 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]
>> and I'm not sure we'll forever use web-architecture: it's ugly,
its as ugly as your widget set and native browser, which is the same level of beauty and/or ugliness you will get from tools binding the widgetsets locally.
I'm talking about web-applications of architecture. (X)HTML+JavaScript is slow, error-prone way of doing things. You can not even handle keyboard events in sane way! Sure - it can all be fixed with new clients, but... if we need new clients anyway then why not just switch to sane model ?
>> slow and inefficient, *VM is much better
the speed of the network is constant across any app.
Speed of network - yes. If you transfer the same amount of data across the network, that is. *VM makes it possible to process a lot of data locally. Think about Flash: it's primitive VM and that exactly why so much sites are using it. Unfortunatelly today both Java and C# lack simple tools for simple applications - and when you are creating simple prototype as web-based application you are stuck later. Microsoft is trying to change it with XAML. Free world have XUL but since it's coupled with insane language it does not help much. Plus there are no 500 millions of clients with XUL support, but there will be 500 millions of clients with XAML - you can bet on it.
and whether you think running apps on vms as opposed to apps via markup is better, it doesn't matter, the web audience is 500 million users.
Hmm... And what this argument does here on LWN ? Either Linux does not matter or something's wrong with your arguments: there are over 500 million Windows users but relatively small number of Linux users so Linux and thus LWN do not matter.
Sorry, but this reminds me of old TCP/IP vs IPX dispute. 20 years ago it was quite clear that TCP/IP is bloated and unsuitable for "real-world networks" and everyone worked with IPX: games, messanging, etc. Where is IPX now ? I think HTML-obsession will fade over time and we'll switch to more sane model: HTML+JavaScript do not scale. Which model will surpass today's HTML+Javascript is still open question.
It ain't over till the fat lady sings
Posted Oct 25, 2005 15:44 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
>> I'm talking about web-applications of architecture.>> (X)HTML+JavaScript is slow, error-prone way of doing things.
such as?
>> *VM makes it possible to process a lot of data locally. Think about
>> Flash: it's primitive VM and that exactly why so much
>> sites are using it.
??? people use flash because it is a shortcut to dynamic content, and frankly its designer tools are better. the adoption of flash has nothing to do with its treatment of network traffic - it operates the same way the browser does with respect to data. it has a local cache, a scripting layer, and a network socket available.
>> Hmm... And what this argument does here on LWN ? Either Linux does not
>> matter or something's wrong with your arguments
the web platform has already taken off and no it doesn't matter what OS you use as long as it is fairly stable, supports a decent browser, and has network support. this works out in *favor* of linux, since linux now favorably competes on basis of price, given equal feature support. in your VM/api world, linux cannot compete because microsoft and sun will never release 100% free (osi-compliant, "free as in speech") versions of their VMs and apis. so i think your point is self-defeating, unless you are willing to accept non-free software. in the webapp world, you don't have to.
>> Sorry, but this reminds me of old TCP/IP vs IPX dispute.
how and why are webapps tied to a single network implementation? the 500 million people using the web aren't going anywhere. they will be using the web in a decade and two decades in some form (an open network with markup based communications).
it does look like redhat has won
Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:35 UTC (Mon) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]
Novell's revenue last quarter was $290 mil and it was still profitable so it's not _that_ bad.
I'm excited about OpenSuse. That will help build the SuSE brand and it's a better way to develop software anyway. Based on how Fedora did, it will take a couple years before OpenSuse really gets rolling.
Novell vs Red Hat
Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:20 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
As far as I can see, Novell has had to struggle with retraining their oldstaff, trying to instill the Linux/Unix culture and history in them,
while the Red Hat staff has been there for most of the Linux history and
already has the culture ingrained. This makes for a huge credibility gap
between the two. It's painful for me to listen to a Novell salesman talk
about Linux.
Faulty Paradigms for Business Week
Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:39 UTC (Mon) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link]
I'd like to take issue with the sentiment represented, even if I'm preaching to the choir. There's the continuing problem of transposition of proprietary software ecosystem realities incorrectly onto free software ecosystems, as demonstrated:
" The worry is that Red Hat will become just as dominant in Linux as Microsoft has become with its Windows operating system. That would eliminate one of the key attractions of Linux, and may make corporate customers less willing to rely on the operating system for their servers."
Linux users, I suspect in large part, understand that As Goes Red Hat, So Goes Red Hat, and that Red Hat is subordinate to Linux, not vice versa. The quoted paradigm is false because no non-Microsoft distributors of Windows Operating System exist; Windows is subordinate to Microsoft by nature.
Sure, I'd love to see Novell increase, but that is ultimately their problem, not a general Linux problem. The assumption that Novell's potential failure represents a "major setback for Linux" is based on the assumption that the goals of Linux and the goals of Novell are congruent.
Thirdly, I'm having trouble understanding where, in the supposed paradigm, Red Hat dominance of Linux makes Linux less desirable, in a market already saturated by monopoly-product. Half of the time, the Business world is telling us that we need to coalesce into a state of smaller choice and stronger branding, to align with their expectations from a field saturated with proprietary offerings subordinate each to its own company's objectives.
IMHO, we really need to export culture to export software. It's always worked for American Democracy. ;)
Faulty Paradigms for Business Week
Posted Oct 25, 2005 3:34 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]
I agree. I don't think anyone who has their heart in Open Source/Free Software should spend much effort worrying about marketplace issues. It is obvious how much of an advantage using Open Source can be for companies, if they use it on its own terms. The F/OSS ecosystem doesn't really care about any individual company's existance. Of course, it is *very nice* that Red Hat/Novell/etc employs many great F/OSS coders. But, it should be enough to show that the Linux ecosystem will move ahead - witness the existence of Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Apache, etc. This is software that can't be killed. To me, that's the whole point - not to be dependent on a vendor, unless you want to be. How many support contracts came to mean nothing as the company behind it imploded? Independence and freedom are what it is all about.
Business will exploit what is exploitable if it helps their profitability. If it can't do that because it doesn't see the evidence, well, that's their problem. Self-education and investigation should help them get over that.
Faulty Paradigms for Business Week
Posted Oct 25, 2005 18:17 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
Of course, it is *very nice* that Red Hat/Novell/etc employs many great F/OSS coders. But, it should be enough to show that the Linux ecosystem will move ahead - witness the existence of Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Apache, etc. This is software that can't be killed. To me, that's the whole point - not to be dependent on a vendor, unless you want to be.Yes, probably this software can't be killed, but can be seriously hindered. I seem to remember a comment from Andrew Morton on this site that the load on the lkml drops during weekends nowadays, and this wasn't the case some years ago. I wonder how many of the kernel, GNOME or KDE developers are actually paid for their work on Linux - and don't forget that this software is included in Debian, Gentoo, etc. too.
Faulty Paradigms for Business Week
Posted Oct 25, 2005 4:12 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
>> Linux users, I suspect in large part, understand that As Goes Red Hat, So>> Goes Red Hat, and that Red Hat is subordinate to Linux, not vice versa.
generally i agree with this, but linux and linux-related system *development* is increasingly becoming a paid-affair, and while there is still a decent level in diversity in the employment and motivations of most of the developers-who-matter, this might not always be the case.
i can see where redhat's imprimatur (or revocation of support) could change the direction projects take and their success considerably. look at mono. regardless of their reasons, redhat has stated they will simply never ship it. that means mono is not going to end up in the X% of large enterprises where redhat is the vendor and support contract. yes people can download mono on their own, but these people are a rounding error, and no phb is going to develop major new systems on a codebase that the support vendor refuses to touch. also look at how redhat's support of gnome has helped levitate what at certain points in history has been the inferior desktop environment.
i agree with you that redhat's dominance does not make linux undesirable, in fact it probably gives phb's a warm fuzzy feeling knowing their support contract is likely going to "be there" in five years or one bear market.
Faulty Paradigms for Business Week
Posted Oct 25, 2005 9:35 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Redhat is to Servers what Novell tries to be towards desktops.
There are a few reasons why Gnome is as good as it is today. Lots comes from Sun and their usability studies from 2001 that Gnome devs took to heart.. but another large push, ironicly, comes from Novell.
Look at the work that Novell has put into the Gnome desktop from their purchase of Ximian. For instance on Evolution file manager they open sourced the Exchange compatability plugin, they improved it considurably and it is now the default e-mail client for gnome.
They also hired cairo and glitz hackers, which is paying off by vector graphic support in the latest gnome gtk toolkit and eventually opengl acceleration thru glitz in up and coming releases. A large part of that is due specificly to Novell's paid developers. (they'd do it without novell, but it's nice to have the money and resources)
They bought Suse and open sourced Yast, which people have been waiting on for a long time.
They developed mono, which leads to great developments with C# applications on Gnome such as F-spot, Tomboy, and Beagle. Lots of that got started from help from Novell.
Previously Gnome desktop was a C-only affair. Now we have fast C bindings and toolkits for a couple of rapid-application-developement style languages in the form of Python and C#. (of course python stuff doesn't have anything to do with Novell, just commenting on the progress)
Also from Novell we have Hula, which is going to provide open source implimentations for the 2 most usefull aspects of MS exchange: email and calendering. Not to mention protocol support for calendering thru a veriaty of email clients including evolution.
And most recently they launched betterdesktop.org and seeded it will actual videos of users on desktops. Invaluable stuff to desktop application and UI developers.
They have actually done Windows to Linux desktop transitions, studied the problems, documented the pitfalls. They have scripts, documentation, and support software that clients can use to circumvent the issues.
All sorts of stuff like that.
They have groupware that is good that supports linux, even if it's currently closed source. They have directory services. All this works for Linux right now, were as open source competators to Exchange are still lacking. Also they have a loyal following that beleive in them/trust them thru the long time netware user crowd. They have support systems around the world, they have many existing contracts with numerous governmental/educational/industrial orginizations around the world.
They have all these advantages. Trouble is that they can't compete with Microsoft enteprise software when the desktop platform is Windows. How the hell do you have a chance to win when your competator owns and designs the only viable desktop platform?
Don't get me wrong. Redhat is great. There servers are great, the software is great. Thru IBM, SGI, and others, as well as numerious kernel developments of their own they made Linux 2.6 ready for enterprise markets and increased the scalability of Linux's performance immensely. They gave us GFS, they gave us big improvements in ext3 over the years, they've offer good enterprise support and a stable long term platform for businesses to use for 5-7 years without distruptive upgrades. They've have helped out Gnome. They've open sourced a top-line LDAP directory server as well as management tools, netscape directory services. (now calling it redhat directory and fedora directory services).
If you want to build a high-aviability highly-scalable distributed linux file server cluster using a combination of open source technologies such as Lustre and GFS and combine it with support for Oracle databases and Veritas storage technology... You go to Redhat. I sincerly doubt that Novell can realy deliver like Redhat/HP/IBM can in the server.
But personally I've gotten the impression that Redhat engineers haven't touched a 'real' enterprise desktop that people actually use since Windows 98. Bluecurve was a interesting thing, but in a crippled puppy sort of way.
But if you want a Linux desktop roll-out to replace a large number of Windows clients... I'd take a long hard look at Novell and Suse.
The way things stand is that Novell will either make Linux on the desktop a marketable item for big business, or they will die trying. It maybe to late for them, maybe they hung onto netware to long, but I hope they make it. And if they can't make Linux on the desktop a profitable item, I doubt anybody can.
Faulty Paradigms for Business Week
Posted Oct 25, 2005 17:00 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
" The way things stand is that Novell will either make Linux on the desktop a marketable item for big business, or they will die trying "
"EVERYBODY" will die trying.
When counting business records among Linux companies, the prvalent issue that always come to my mind is *blindness*.
Imagine 5-7 years from now. Typical midsize company, if nothing really serious towards desktop is done, will have most probabily Vista desktops and linux servers. Now i belive its no mistery to no one that Vista is partialy behind DRM protecting measures, and could be *totaly behind DRM* by means of automatic updates controled most positively by Microsoft. Then at the right moment they intruduce incompatibilitys, for *security reasons of course*!, and say that the Linux server are not up to their standards, even though they are better in security than Vista courterparts, and only Linux suppliers that make deals with Microsoft(for Microsoft advantage no doubt), will have a chance, and *DRM keys* to play with Vista Desktops.
Guess who will be the big winner ? (Dont mind OASIS formats)
So Linux companies that dont *SERIOUSLY* invest in desktop are stupidly blind, bullied already by Microsoft, or waiting to see if they could make the best deals!
I dont care for actual business records and fait divers like in this article. They are only drivel to make us sleep. What i do care is that Novell is in the right track, and Red Hat is falling behind because of their negligence of desktop. To me they all should be adviced to enter the right track, though the fight is going to be terrible,:
http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,...
http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,...
http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,...
Faulty Paradigms for Business Week
Posted Oct 25, 2005 9:39 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
linux and linux-related system *development* is increasingly becoming a paid-affairExcellent. This means that people who aren't developers are getting the chance to improve the system in ways they find useful (if only via paying Red Hat to do it, or via whatever mysterious market-research consultancy osmosis IBM uses to find out what features users want). This is a large part of the point of the `free' in `freedom': even if you don't program, you can pay someone to do it for you.
This does no harm to those of us who are free software developers either, no matter how lunatic the desires of the bunch paying the bills might be. Think about it: even if a billion programmers materialized out of empty air and started hacking on Linux for pay, this would not make the existing people who hack on it for fun vanish, nor would it stop them forking projects that the billion programmers moved in some direction the free hackers considered undesirable. All it would do would be to attract some of that billion to free software hacking, and that cannot but be a good thing.
(Yes, I know my numbers are ridiculous. That's the point: even if far more programmers than there are on Earth started hacking for pay, it wouldn't diminish the contributions of those who hack for the sheer joy of it one whit.)
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 25, 2005 11:05 UTC (Tue) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]
What about the European market? Are Novell losing there as well? Europe was always SUSE's stronghold, not the US. Hopefully Novell didn't lose focus of their stronghold in exchange for efforts in a market where they're weak to begin with?
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 27, 2005 7:29 UTC (Thu) by duck (subscriber, #4444) [Link]
They surely are, still no SUSE boxes available from Swiss bookstores(they used to be among the first shops where you could buy the SUSE
Boxes....).
And Novell continues to ruin their reputation, some shops still
sell SUSE Firewall on CD (A product that lost support(!) a few month ago),
because Novell totally messed up the retail channels.
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 25, 2005 14:57 UTC (Tue) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]
Novell needs to pull their head out. I still remember what a pain it was to evaluate Suse enterprise server. We have a Novell site license and it took 2 or 3 weeks to get an official license key for the damn thing so we could install updates, after downloading iso's from their slower than snot servers. What a crock. Today Novell/Suse has lost out to our local Mandriva and Ubuntu mirrors, and we are beginning a hard look at our old Netware file server infrastructure.
Advice to Novell, get rid of the sales critters, release an open source groupware server for Linux, open source NDS for Linux, open source and update the old Netware for Unix/Linux product, bring the old Netware SFTIII technology to Linux as open source, use Open Suse as the driver for everything, in other words, compete with the rest of the Linux world.
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 25, 2005 21:51 UTC (Tue) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]
> release an open source groupware server for Linux
Aren't there enough of those already? Namely:
- Open-Xchange (which is available bundled with SUSE)
- Kolab
- OpenGroupware.org
- phpGroupWare
- Citadel (originally a BBS server, but has groupware-like features)
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 27, 2005 16:02 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]
PDA synchronization, native cross platform clients, and shared scheduling are key requirements not met by the current crop of libre/open source groupware solutions. If there is a solution that meets all of the above, please share. I have hope that Chandler, Hula, Sunbird, and CalDAV will eventually meet the needs. For now the closed source solutions appear to have the goods.
Novell still pushes their closed source products, software licenses, as their primary means of doing business rather than a customer support model. Want groupware? Buy Groupwise. Want directory services? Buy NDS. Want a file server? Buy Netware and it's closed source clients. Want support? Pay for that seperately. I will be steering our cash strapped college towards customer driven FLOSS solutions wherever possible, this means away from Novell at the current time. Welcome to the FLOSS community Novell, innovate or die.
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 27, 2005 21:51 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]
Judging by the Kolab2 Architecture Draft, it looks to me like all of those things are supported. This part would seem to cover "shared scheduling":
1.4. Calendar Entries…
Users can schedule group events and invite other users. An existing group event can be modified by the user who originally created it. Examples for group events are:This part would seem to cover "PDA synchronization":Group events are saved like private calendar entries on the Kolab server and differ only by their attributes and access permissions.
- Group meetings
- Conferences
1.9. Palm PDA Synchronization
The contacts, calendar events, notes, and task lists can be synchronized with a personal digital assistant (PDA) bidirectionally. The HotSync protocol is used and guarantees compatibility to a wide range of PDA devices. The reference platform is a 3Com Palm V running Palm OS v3.1.And as for clients, there are several of them, including ones for Windows.
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 26, 2005 8:20 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I can't know, but I wouldn't be suprised if they CAN'T release NDS and their Groupware software as open source software.
When doing big software developement it's pretty much a given that your going to buy software and farm out parts of the developement to other companies. Why rewrite from scratch when the part you need is already built and you can just buy it?
Well the nature of closed source cross licensing scemes can hurt businesses that sell software as much as it can hurt customers that get locked in to a closed source product unwittedly.
For example. (for a moment completely forget the much more recent Linux vs SCO stuff) Take a old case of SCO vs Microsoft.
So you get this.. AT&T had their Unix. They couldn't sell computers themselves due to their monopolistic standing (court orders).
So AT&T licensed code to other companies that would develop it and sell it for their computers. This is what Microsoft did.. they licensed code for their unix system, Xenix, and hired SCO to develop it.
Microsoft eventually licensed code back to AT&T in order to make sure that future PC versions of unix would be compatable with Xenix stuff. AT&T used the code to ensure compatability and paid royalties to Microsoft.
Novell eventually bought the Unix code, sued some people, ruined BSD unix, and inherited the licensing agreement with the xenix code and Microsoft.
Eventually Novell sold the rights (more or less) to that stuff to SCO which went on to successfully build Unix systems for the x86 platform for many years. Of course by this time all that Xenix stuff was completely obsolete and Microsoft released NT which was hoped by many people to be the 'unix killer'.
So here you have two competing companies selling operating systems aimed for the same market on the same hardwawre platform. The only snag was that one was forced to maintain obsolete code by ancient AT&T agreement and not only that they had to pay their direct competators for the pleasure.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/tale.shtml
I think that there is crap like that all going on all the time, especially with old code bases like what Novell has for NDS and Groupware stuff. Who knows how many dozens cross licensing agreements they have with companies. Who have they sold code to, who have they licensed code from.
I think that it's pretty likely that Novell CAN'T open source their own software even if they wanted to (which I have no idea of).
Still though as far as new projects Novell has contributed a lot. Go look at mono, look at evolution email client, X.org development, and gnome desktop development.
For groupware-like stuff they've released Hula as free software.
Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)
Posted Oct 26, 2005 18:45 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]
> Novell eventually bought the Unix code, sued some people, ruined BSD unix
The USL vs. UCB lawsuit was filed while USL was still owned by AT&T.