Novell announces its layoffs [LWN.net]

As has been expected for a while, Novell has announced that it is laying off some 600 people. The purpose of the restructuring is to allow the company to focus on its "growth opportunities," defined as Linux and "identity." Hopefully that bodes well for the Linux developers employed there.

to post comments

Novell announces its layoffs

Posted Nov 2, 2005 22:55 UTC (Wed) by ulf (guest, #33563) [Link] (3 responses)

I think laying off people is a bad habit. I would have hoped much more a
way could have been found to keep them - and maybe train them to support
linux.

Novell announces its layoffs

Posted Nov 3, 2005 1:13 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

It's not like the next thing they'll do is hire 600 other people to support Linux.

Novell announces its layoffs

Posted Nov 3, 2005 4:47 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

That would require not only money but also imagination.

Novell announces its layoffs

Posted Nov 3, 2005 9:42 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

laying off some people is better then keeping them on staff, going bankrupt and then having to fire everybody, plus have everybody loose their benifits, and etc etc.

Doing layoffs is just part of business. It's unfortunate, but it's the way things are. Unless your able to do that there is going to be no way you can adjust for changing business conditions or anything else that can happen.

If you were to start a union or a law or whatever to force companies to keep people employeed when they are otherwise useless or unprofitable you'll end up hurting the company more and in the larger sceme of things hurt economic growth. If they can't change and adapt then they won't grow and ultimately your going to loose a lot more potential jobs then you saved.

Of course some corporations are dicks about this sort of thing and use money games and layoffs to artificially boost stock prices. I don't think that this is the case for Novell though.

sad, but novell has been a mess for some time

Posted Nov 2, 2005 23:20 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (4 responses)

the legacy product lines, the confusing linux strategy, the expectation of keeping up with red hat...things have not been boding well for some time.

its likely that this would have had to have happened even sooner if the "linux bubble" of 2004 had not inflated their stock.

hula, mono, evolution...how do these projects enhance novell's bottom line? i think its fair to ask that participation in open projects be scaled back in times of constraint. you could make the same point about redhat's participation in certain projects with the key difference being red hat is making a lot of money, they can afford to underwrite participation in open source code. evolution is a fringe product compared to even thunderbird. mono is based on a false premise of .net becoming the de facto development platform. novell should yank support for these distractions, particularly because they have had so little impact even in the open source world.

sad, but novell has been a mess for some time

Posted Nov 3, 2005 1:23 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (3 responses)

Actually, Evo COULD have a big impact on many peoples' worlds, if only it weren't so darn buggy! It's still the only Linux-based application that can do a decent job of group calendaring with Microsoft Exchange server. Many, probably even most, medium-to-large companies (at least in the U.S.) are completely wedded to Exchange as a mail server and the single most significant reason is group calendaring. I know there are some nascent attempts to provide this using free software but it's not smooth yet by any stretch, and switching away from Exchange is just a non-starter for most companies, for at least a while to come. Without a reliable and usable native Linux client people are relegated to the feature-poor web interface, or they have to have something like VMWare (which really negates Linux's advantage in terms of up-front and licensing costs--you need a license for Windows, AND a license for VMWare, AND a license for Linux support--not much of a deal there!)

If Novell could get Evo + Connector to be a solid, reliable application it could generate a lot of interest. I've been using Evo+Connector for a few years now, but I've never once been tempted to switch to it full-time: it just crashes all the time (I'm currently up to Gnome 2.10--haven't tried the new Evo in Gnome 2.12 yet). Instead I wrote a Perl script to use IMAP to fetch my mail down from the Exchange server and inject it into my local MDA. If the mail has a vcalendar attachment, I leave it on the server but move it into a special folder. If it doesn't, I delete it from the server. That way I read all my mail using a different mail client, but I can use Evo+Connector to manage my calendaring.

It seems pretty stable at receiving and scheduling new meetings, but at least 80% of the time when I get an update (changing the time,etc.) Evo just dies horribly.

sad, but novell has been a mess for some time

Posted Nov 3, 2005 9:56 UTC (Thu) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] (2 responses)

"It's still the only Linux-based application that can do a decent job of group calendaring with Microsoft Exchange server. "

I'm sorry if this reply comes off as sour. But I really think that all
this effort (good effort) being put into Evo is being misplaced.

Microsoft Exchange is the /problem/.

Doing a good job of interacting with the problem is still a problem.

(paraphrase)
"but it's the only group calender blah blah blah."

hula.

Posted Nov 3, 2005 11:11 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

well, not exactly so, but true enough. And expending effort into assuring the continued lock on the "group calender" by a monopolist, isn't helping. If the effort would rather, go into some of other group calender initiatives out there, I think better ends would be served.

Which is why Novell started Hula from the ashes of their Netmail stuff. Webmail, email, calendering, and contact information.

It's a 90% solution to the no-decent-oss-groupware problem. The other 10% is allowed for by making Hula easily extendable by plugins/extensions, or whatever they call it, to suite specific needs. (they say that they've done benchmarks with Hula on a dual 2.8ghz Xeon machine with 2gigs of ram and a scsi disk array that it handled 200,000 authenticated accounts and 50,000 logged on users at any single point.)

Personally I find that Evolution is stable, I use it everyday. I've heard more then one person complain about it's crashy nature, but that has been at slashdot. Then again I don't use it with Exchange.

I happy that my employeer has stayed the hell away from Exchange, and they are also.

Exchange bites... but so what?

Posted Nov 3, 2005 13:37 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

You are missing the point. Yes, obviously things would be better if there were a really great free alternative to Exchange, and if companies were open to switching to it. But that's not the reality, yet. Of course I'd prefer to ditch Exchange: not only is it expensive in every way, but it behaves badly in many situations.

However, that's not the option. The selection, purchase, and maintenance of the corporate mail setup is controlled by the IT department, or even provided from an outside contractor like CSC. The choice is, have a Linux application that can interoperate with Exchange, or don't have a viable Linux desktop. Perhaps you don't care about that, but in my opinion any and every opportunity to introduce diversity into an environment that has a tendency to prefer homogeneity has to be seized.

There's a good reason why the software that RMS and the FSF (surely the most idealogical group in the F/OSS movement) writes is some of the most portable software ever created: they understood this reality better than many.

Novell announces its layoffs

Posted Nov 4, 2005 23:54 UTC (Fri) by norsk (guest, #30746) [Link]

After 8 years in the netware core OS group I was laid off there in sep 2000. Had years and years of unix and linux experience. That was before they saw the light of linux. Don't know the culture today, but Novell was well know for periodic layoffs, then to hire other talent. That way they could flush the pool of the lower 15% of the talent base, and fill in with hopefully brighter (and cheaper) talent.