Novell's transition program [LWN.net]

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 11, 2008 22:08 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Your own description of the situation may already be a sufficient explanation for this
without any need for conspiracy theories:

Like you called them, the "already converted Linux users" may simply be _much_ easier
to get than the hard to convince "Microsoft slaves". So even as the latter are so much
more, there may be some serious money to gain by pursuing the first group. It certainly
works on small scale: Windows users often have to be persuaded to try Linux, while
users of other distributions sometimes just have to see how well the one you're using
works, to give it a try.

So the decision to not ignore a large potential customer group seems pretty standard
business to me. It may not be good for the community, but it's certainly something a
business has to consider.

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 11, 2008 22:30 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

And most important of all. SUSE does compete directly against RedHat. It's bad business not to recognize that. Community is good, but Novell and Redhat are in business to make money first. Not only that but they are in direct competition for the same business. Where possible you try to compete. The difference is the GPL and the FOSS community, there is nothing stopping Redhat from taking all Novell's stuff and releasing it themselves if it's GPL software, but IMO Novell shouldn't try to help RedHat compete. We want strong companies backing FOSS, but that also means they need to compete against each other to keep prices down and innovation up.

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 12, 2008 15:54 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

> they need to compete against each other to keep prices down and innovation up.

I'm really skeptic about that.

It's my perception that FOSS companies do not really compete in features among them, but rather in trustiness and service quality.

On the other hand, FOSS companies do compete in features and price with _closed_ source companies, not in isolation but as a group. That's the nature of open source development.

Personally I think that, to keep innovation up, we just need to put a Linux development environment into each bright person's computer. And one can argue that prices can hardly be any lower...

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 12, 2008 16:32 UTC (Wed) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link]

Competition has many forms.

On the engineering side, cooperation prevails. (Look at the recent dialogue on clustering, for instance.) Still, some times competition happens - for potential employees, between differing solutions to problems, deciding on different OSS projects, etcetera. And possibly merging ways again when the differentiation is decided to no longer be cost-efficient, or a clear technological winner has emerged. That is simply sound and rational engineering.

Marketing is the same. Yes, there is is joint competition against the other incumbents, such as Microsoft and Solaris. But when you look at a specific sale or contract, each of the companies competes against _all_ others; that is a reality no for profit company can ignore, either. Not just price. A big part of this is services (as the power of the technology is largely equivalent) - how easy is it to buy from a given company? How much will they help me with the pain of transition?

Linux companies are uniquely positioned to ease transition from other Linux vendors, exactly because the technology situation. It would be much more difficult to provide transitional support for a Solaris or Windows customer. So Oracle does UBL, and I'd not be surprised to see more such offers being made official from more companies - as it is clearly already happening in practice, anyway.

And, hey, that is one of the key reasons why some customers decide on Linux: less vendor lock-in, which is exactly what such an announcement proves, and as such could make Linux even more attractive to some. "Woah, indeed, no vendor lock-in, not just talk!"

It doesn't need any conspiracy theory, really, nor does this mean that anyone has hard feelings for one another, or that engineers would cooperate less; the business rationale seems to make sense to me.

(And no, I'm not speaking for Novell, just voicing my own thoughts.)

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 12, 2008 17:39 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> On the engineering side, cooperation prevails. (Look at the recent dialogue on clustering, for instance.) Still, some times competition happens - for potential employees, between differing solutions to problems, deciding on different OSS projects, etcetera. And possibly merging ways again when the differentiation is decided to no longer be cost-efficient, or a clear technological winner has emerged. That is simply sound and rational engineering.

I most everything people do cooperation is essential. It doesn't really matter a whole lot if your competing companies or not. Or scientists or whatever.

There is this prevailing attitude with American businessmen that high degree of competitiveness is essential in having a successful business. For example, you have 'Sun Tzu's Art of War' was a huge fad among businessmen, teaching themselves the art of deception and all that happy horseshit. Well the book itself teaches that this is for war only and is destructive and counter-productive in all other times, but people seem to miss that lesson. (and the flip side.. having compassion, honesty, and tolerance is good assets to have, unless your in war which then they become deadly mistakes (war is bad m'kay...))

Well this is a mistaken viewpoing IMO. It's a whole bunch of ignorance and arrogance to view that goes along with that sort of viewpoint. This sort of thinking is done out of this idea of 'American Superiority' in business and innovation, which is a myth. You end up with people on the top that are arrogant and blind to what is happening around them. They figure what they need to do is destroy the opposing force, rather then pleasing their customers, people that think they are sublime geniuses in business and think that the company's success is due to their intelligence and foresight while the company's failure is due to circumstances outside of their control.

They don't notice that the success of the company is due to their workers, their 'peons'. Their job as businessmen and managers is to help the workers do what workers want... which is to create a high quality product on time and with minimal fuss and misery.

The trick to business is that you simply out-compete the other people. They are not your enemies, but if you can do a better job then do a better job. This doesn't mean that it's a us vs them, it just means that you do a better job.

Higher levels of quality, higher levels of production, better value, more innovation (in products, quality, and production), better customer service. That's what is required to be successful. 'Quality is Job 1' sort of thing.

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 12, 2008 18:27 UTC (Wed) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link]

How is doing a better job [than the competition, and explaining this to the customer] not a form of competition, precisely? How is this - helping customers migrate - not exactly an attempt at convincing them about exactly that?

And of course, marketing folks try their best to explain the choices to the customer, and sales tries to answer all questions they still might have. Making customers aware of their choices is competition (with all other bidders, implicitly), but is it harmful?

I am not american, so I prefer not to comment on your assessment of american businessmen, but I would dare say that competition is not inherently negative - just like some people only seem to read parts of The Art of War or The Prince, some people seem to be looking at only part of what "competition" might mean.

Novell's transition program

Posted Dec 25, 2008 18:01 UTC (Thu) by anomalizer (guest, #53112) [Link]

You can either grow the pie or eat into someone else's share of the pie. Novell seems to choosing the latter. The pie here is *nix FOSS setups.

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 12, 2008 0:22 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

only releasing clients and tools for Suse Linux and not a single other distribution

What do you mean by this? If it's free software, you can easily build and run it on any distribution you like. If it's non-free, that is a far more serious problem than being merely distro-specific.

Novell's transition program

Posted Nov 12, 2008 4:06 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I think this particular "tool" is quite pointless on anything but SUSE :-)