Novell may nix NetWare development (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com reports that Novell is looking to drop NetWare in favor of Linux. "Although company representatives haven't said that Novell will stop all development on the NetWare platform, they did say the company is looking to Linux as the future. The revenues from NetWare have declined 9 percent to 14 percent a quarter, said one representative, making the switch a no-brainer."

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Novell may nix NetWare development (News.com)

Posted Aug 6, 2003 20:36 UTC (Wed) by hisdad (subscriber, #5375) [Link]

It has never been that Netware didn't work well. It was that the licencing of it (post NW3.12) was too expensive compared with Win NT.

If Novell builds an expensive product around the Linux kernel, they are not going to gain anything.

Regards,
Dad

Novell may nix NetWare development (News.com)

Posted Aug 7, 2003 16:21 UTC (Thu) by kenwitb (guest, #13777) [Link]

I think that dad's response is quite a bit off mark, no offense. Anyone
that believes Micro$oft licencing is cheeper than Novell's. Must never
have bought one or the other. Speaking from, current, experience in a
mixed NetWare and Win2000 environment. I am getting about 270% better ROI
on the NetWare side in hardware and software lic costs. I even serve more
users with less rack space since I don't need a server for every
service...least things get real unstable, and guess what I spent less on
the bottom line. Less money to do more with less hassel. With linux
around I don't see why developers are wasting there time writing
Micro$oft "don't net" applications. If I can build a NetWare environment
that is cheeper, faster, and more stable. Think what can be done with
linux. Again I don't see how Micro$oft could be cheaper compared to
Novell.

I am not going to contest the second sentance cause, I believe he is
right. Novell needs to tread carefully but I believe that their timing is
good.

Best wishes,
Ken

Novell may nix NetWare development (News.com)

Posted Aug 8, 2003 14:44 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

I concur... at one of my former employers we had NetWare file servers that had uptimes easily over a year. The company switched to Win2000 and you can guess for yourself what happened... angry users, much wailing and gnashing of teeth by admins (including myself, although I was chiefly over the Macs and so missed most of the pain.) The price of NetWare is well worth it as far as proprietary stuff goes as far as I'm concerned.