A tale of two channels? [LWN.net]

A tale of two channels?

Posted Nov 4, 2003 19:16 UTC (Tue) by maney (subscriber, #12630)
Parent article: On Novell's acquisition of SUSE

Of course, Caldera/SCO was also supposed to succeed based on its channel...

As I was just said in another venue, one big difference is likely to be the attitude of the channels to Linux. From what we've heard, the old SCO channel and its customers had little if any interest in Linux. I'm not sure how much interest Novell's customers have in Linux per se, but Novell has been using Linux in at least a few tools (such as their system imaging solution, which is usually run from a CD that boots a Linux kernel) for some time. So while there may or may not be great enthusiasm for Linux per se, it's seems unlikely there's active opposition to it as there seemed to be with old SCO.

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A tale of two channels?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 1:37 UTC (Thu) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

From what we've heard, the old SCO channel and its customers had little if any interest in Linux.

Dunno about the SCO retail channel, but apparently its customers have or had a great deal of interest in Linux. That's what got SCO into the mess it's in now, remember? The fact that everyone seems to be upgrading from OpenServer to Linux these days?

Anyway, Novell has said before that their customers are asking about Linux. As, indeed, any customer of business server solutions should have been doing, for the past two or three years now at least. And I believe Novell when they say they intend to ship a Linux-based Netware server product real soon now, as an alternative to running Netware on their own Netware kernel.

It is essentially the same conclusion SGI reached when it came time for them to upgrade to IA64 [and, say what you will about IA64, it is an upgrade from MIPS64]: would it be cheaper and easier to port IRIX to IA64, or to adapt Linux-IA64 to SGI's customers' needs? Answer: the latter. Likewise, I expect Novell to phase out their own rather limited kernel over the next couple of releases, for essentially the same reason: it's cheaper, in the long run, to leverage Linux kernel development and build on that. Plus, it gives them brand name relevance for the crowd whose reaction to the big red N is "didn't we replace that with NT back in 1997?" (forgetting perhaps the cost/benefit ratio usually associated with that transition).