Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

ZDNet talks with Novell managers David Patrick and Alan Murray. "The first big global deployment of desktop Linux will be Novell. We are moving 6000 employees over to Linux. By 1 August, everyone in the company is going to be on Open Office and then, by this autumn, roughly half the company will be on Linux and the rest we are finishing off as soon as possible after that."

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Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 20:53 UTC (Wed) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] (11 responses)

This is something I expected from RedHat: deploy Linux internally - learn problems and fix them. But this company first argued absolutely for open-sources and freedoms, and then fliped to completely proprietary approach.

Best luck Novell!

P.S. This sort of reflects my own move from RH (which was standard OS at my last two jobs) to SUSE. Seems people moving from RHL to SUSE en masse. I prefered SUSE, but industry were routinely sitting on RHLs.

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 21:02 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] (1 responses)

Please don't keep repeating the RedHat-went-over-to-the-dark-side myth... it's not at all helpful, not to mention not being true. I myself am a confirmed Slackware user, but still I don't like seeing untruth propagated.

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 24, 2004 9:40 UTC (Thu) by philips (guest, #937) [Link]

This is not about dark-side or any black-vs.-white, good-vs.-bad.
It is just RedHat as company has changed.

I'm device driver developer and I have to keep an eye some amount of mail-lists to be on track.

What I have observed is the change in behaviour of RH engineers. In the beginning they were very communicative, responsive. But couple of years ago was a change. It like something have been broken. It was time when KDE guy departed RH party, when Alan Cox took "vacations." After that was announcment of RHL line of products end.

RHL death is absolutely Ok for me. It was my personal opinion that RH can make money by being more concentrated on customers' needs. But those time they have touted that they do not want to go off open-source trail: customer stuff most of the time proprietary/internal/whatever to customer.

But they resisted. They wanted some sort of open-source purity for RHL. they were idealists.

And then something got broken.

RHL death is just peak of iceberg. RH engineers stopped listening in discussions and were dumping some out-of-discussion data on you making conclusion that you understand nothing and anyway everything already decided without you. As if they just have left brain-washing meeting with they management.

Something really really went very broken.

I've being communicating with MySQL guys for about one year. MySQL is proprietary too. But MySQL people (especially Monty ;) are really nice to talk: they will listen you, will try to help you to understand why you are wrong or why MySQL do not do what I need, or after all how to do it better with MySQL.

RedHat? Check Fedora lists, GNOME lists, GCC lists, glibc lists. This people are really behind some kind of wall right now...

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 21:13 UTC (Wed) by csm1975 (guest, #15864) [Link] (1 responses)

>But this company first argued absolutely for open-sources and freedoms, and >then fliped to completely proprietary approach.

Eh? GPL licensed software is proprietary?

/me suspects the speaker does not know what he's talking about!

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 21:39 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The original poster is objecting to selling it for money, perhaps. Or selling support. (Never mind that Cygnus and the FSF have been doing similar things for years, and that the GNU Manifesto explicitly mentioned that both were good ideas.)

I think it's just envy of other people making money, myself. ;)

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 22:05 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

You should probably not smoke that much crack before posting. Red Hat has been pretty much Linux only since 1995. The only non-linux systems when I was there in 1997 was a Macintosh billing system that then converted to a Solaris Oracle system. The only other box was the windows box that ran the Nortel phone system.

I do not know what this completely propietary approach is other than charging money for getting precompiled updates. Not that much different from the various SuSE, Novell, FSF, and Cygnus methods of delivering software (here is the source for free.. please pay us for the precompiled binaries.)

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 24, 2004 0:50 UTC (Thu) by spot (guest, #15640) [Link]

And that Solaris Oracle is now Linux Oracle. :)

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 22:35 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

I fail to see how moving from RH to SuSE will result in a less "proprietary" system (whatever you mean by that). It's been years since there has been a redistributable SuSE ISO. The last version I recall was 6.x.

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 22:57 UTC (Wed) by gurulabs (guest, #10753) [Link] (2 responses)

You are woefully misinformed.

SUSE has always been much more closed than Red Hat. Novell seems to be turning that around to some extent (GPLd YaST, GPLd Evolution Connector).

* No publically accessible Bugzilla
* No publically accessible SRPMs for errata updates to their Enterprise product
* No publically SRPMs for SLES8 (there are for United Linux v1.0)

* No public beta tests
* No publically accessible ISOs

All of these are (still to this day) a "Yes" with Red Hat.

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 23:13 UTC (Wed) by tuxituk (guest, #19547) [Link] (1 responses)

Ignoring the Live CDs which are ISOs, an install ISO is publically accessible for 9.1, unless I am seeing things?

http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1-personal-iso/

Install that and apt4rpm, and you can then install any RPMS from the ftp version of 9.1, so the personal version is all you need.

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 23, 2004 23:23 UTC (Wed) by gurulabs (guest, #10753) [Link]

Your franken-install is neither the personal nor professional version (the ftp version isn't the same as the professional).

Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 24, 2004 6:36 UTC (Thu) by linux_GAWD (guest, #22546) [Link]

When are some of you people going to learn that the movement to realize a revenue from Linux is what is going to be YOUR saving grace? There is absolutely NO WAY that Linux/GPL will EVER have a hope of propogating en masse like we all want unless SOME organizations that are able to drive this machine can make a profit. Most also give it away for free too! My gawd men (and women) what do you WANT!?!?!

Novell is a clean fighter

Posted Jun 24, 2004 3:20 UTC (Thu) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link]

Novell will play on the up&up. From the early 1990's before everyone sucked up to M$, Novell and Borland played their own game. In fact I suggest right now that Borland with all their development strategies and compiler technology get purchased by Novell also.