Novell acquires Ximian [LWN.net]

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

Every time there's a trade show, there's also a flurry of predictable press releases. New products, product upgrades, new partnerships and so on. But sometimes, a company manages to sneak in a surprise. Novell managed to throw the community a curve during the first day of LinuxWorld Expo by announcing that it had acquired Ximian. Novell executives have also hinted that the company may stop developing NetWare to focus on Linux in the future.

Earlier this year, Novell announced that it would be expanding its Linux offerings, but the announcement was met with some skepticism and concern that Novell's committment to Linux was half-hearted, particularly after an early flub where Novell CEO Jack Messman called Linux "immature." Messman soon apologized, and it would appear that Novell is quite earnest in its committment to Linux.

On Tuesday, I spoke to Miguel de Icaza of Ximian about the acquisition and plans going forward. De Icaza said that Ximian and Novell had already been working together as partners on some projects before Novell made the offer to buy Ximian.

For the time being, expect Ximian to pretty much stay the same course as it was on before the acquisition was announced. De Icaza says that Ximian will operate as an independent subsidiary of Novell and continue with its existing schedule, and deliver the products that were in the pipeline before the acquisition. Evolution, Ximian Connector, Red Carpet, Mono and Ximian Desktop will continue to be developed. Long term, he indicated that there would be tighter integration between Novell's offerings and Ximian's.

Though it wasn't mentioned in Novell's press release, de Icaza says that Novell will also be developing its own Linux distribution in addition to making its products available for other Linux distributions. Few details are available about this new Linux distribution, and de Icaza said that they had not yet established a timeline for the first release. Obviously, users can expect to see the Ximian desktop and tight integration with Ximian's Red Carpet, but details about the remainder of the distribution are sketchy at the moment.

According to de Icaza, one advantage of a Novell Linux distribution is that it would give Ximian the opportunity to delve deeper into the operating system. He noted that Ximian has been somewhat limited in the features they could implement, since Ximian Desktop and other Ximian products had to integrate with other distributions whose development wasn't under Ximian's control. Making modifications to the kernel, for example, wasn't really an option.

Novell will also give Ximian's product line a shot with customers that the company found it difficult to reach before teaming with Novell. The enterprise channel is tough to break into, and de Icaza indicated that Ximian had previously found that larger companies to be nervous about deploying Ximian solutions. As part of Novell, Ximian's products are now considered less risky because customers know Novell.

The fact you have a company the size of Novell that's going to be around, from that perspective that's what gets a lot of people interested. You have a great product, the problem is getting the product into the hands of people...getting access to that channel is very important to us.

Overall, the merger looks to be a good deal for Ximian, Novell and the Linux community as a whole. While Novell's influence has been waning, the company still maintains a respectable presence in the enterprise market. The addition of Novell services to Linux's bag of tricks will definitely help spur Linux adoption on both the desktop and the server in larger companies. On the other side, the acquisition of Ximian may help give Novell a little more credibility with the existing Linux community and help them to get up to speed with Linux more quickly.

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Novell acquires Ximian

Posted Aug 7, 2003 17:29 UTC (Thu) by hans (subscriber, #148) [Link]

I think that's true about companies where there is a great deal of overlap, such as the HP/Compaq merger. But as far as I can tell, Novell and Ximian have complementary properties. Ximian has very little name recognition, while the name Novell is widely known. Ximian is strong on the desktop, while Novell's strength historically has been on the server side of things. Certainly Ximian can be used to manage servers and Novell has some desktop applications, but overall I think Novell's action makes a lot of sense, IMHO, especially if their goal is to eventually convert their core business to a Linux-based one. Their current product line has no long-term future, so they had to do something in order to survive. I think this gives them a good chance.

And although they claim not to be doing this to compete with Microsoft on the desktop, I think that has to be one of their long-term goals. They just don't want to attract too many of Microsoft's attack dogs too early on.

I suppose we'll see. This one will be interesting to watch.

Novell acquires Ximian

Posted Aug 7, 2003 17:31 UTC (Thu) by hans (subscriber, #148) [Link]

Oops! Replace "...Ximian can be used..." with "...Red Carpet can be used...". I need to pay more attention to the comment preview!

Novell acquires Ximian

Posted Aug 7, 2003 20:07 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

> Novell and Ximian have complementary properties

Could be, if they emphasize services. As products, Novell has been in decline and Ximian never prove themselves. They have CTP in the group, so CTP could become the milk cow based on Novell and Ximian products, just as IBM makes money on the services based on their platforms. The problem is that it isn't easy to became another IBM...

Small is beautiful.

Novell acquires Ximian

Posted Aug 7, 2003 20:13 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

To the extent that other distros adopt the deeper OS changes required to run Ximian, it will remain compatible with them. And based on Ximian's participation in freedesktop.org, I'd imagine such changes would be both thoroughly-considered and shared with KDE and other relevant projects.

But this does give them a lot more flexibility. For example, FAM needs kernel support to track file changes, which is extremely helpful for file managers; making their own distribution means they can include this feature in the kernel and desktop, and not worry so much that, say, "The stock Slackware kernel doesn't include FAM, so Ximian is broken on Slackware". Now they don't need to support Slackware 100% for their business model.

So I don't share your concern that this will break other distros. I think they'll just use it to do some more interesting innovation, and it would behoove the other distros (and the deeper OS maintainers themselves) to include these innovations too.