So far, so good, have Novell considered real portability?
Posted Apr 21, 2003 4:24 UTC (Mon) by
leonbrooks (guest, #1494)
In reply to:
Better than I expected by kmagnusson
Parent article:
An apology from Novell's CEO
Hi, Mr Magnusson
It seems to me that making the Linux port of Novell's services also work under one BSD
(say, FreeBSD) would not be very hard, and after that almost too easy for each additional
BSD flavour. This implies that for very little additional effort, Novell could do what it
traditionally seems to have done best - be the glue between many disparate systems
right across the enterprise - at least for Linux, Windows (via CygWin, at least), *BSD and
Mac OS X (and presumably Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, AIX et al) from a single code-base. This
would be very attractive to an integrator faced with Active Directory as an alternative.
Before I get taken for flamebait, I should also point out that a good deal of the
functionality that AD and NDS offer can be replicated using OpenLDAP, IMAP and a few
other completely Open Source tools. Novell would be providing seamless integration and
the well-earned reputation for ruggedness and efficiency picked up from NetWare.
A big bonus from the above plan would be that it would make clear to the squillions of
small developers and integrators about the place that Novell were serious about what
they're doing, not just vocally dabbling in the most popular alternative option in search of
easy karma.
Just to confuse you all: I only use Linux, and the only other OS I routinely have to
integrate with is Borgware (AKA Windows) - I don't regularly use any of the others I
listed above. Yet a broad-fronted approach from Novell would very much more incline me
toward recommending them to my clients than a solitary Linux port.
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