Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek) [LWN.net]

Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

Posted Oct 25, 2005 14:57 UTC (Tue) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813)
Parent article: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

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.

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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:
Group meetings

Conferences
Group events are saved like private calendar entries on the Kolab server and differ only by their attributes and access permissions.

This part would seem to cover "PDA synchronization":

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.