Slip of one’s mouth or true admission of egocentricity?

John Dragoon, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Novell, based in Provo, Utah, told eWEEK in an interview following the release of the open letter that when a customer is making a decision whether or not to deploy in certain environments and there are impediments to that deployment, whether real or imagined, “It is in Novell’s interest – selfish interest, I will admit – to advance-remove whatever those inhibitors be to the advancement of Linux and open source.”

Companies are entitled to pursue their own interests, but spitting at the community that voluntarily put the foundations is simply unacceptable.

A story from Tectonic (South African tech) shows us that Ubuntu trumps SUSE, even based on purely ‘political’ considerations. Unless Novell retracts its deal with the devil, I am afraid that we are likely to find more stories as such.

SLED 10 is good looking, well designed and very usable. Novell has added some excellent features that make the Gnome desktop just a little bit more friendly to use. Surprisingly, the extra overhead didn’t put too much strain on my lower-end IBM Thinkpad notebook.

The obvious question to ask, however, is how the Novell-Microsoft deal will affect SuSE’s market share, both among the free software community and within the corporate sector.

If I was to hazard a guess I would say that we’ll see significant drop off in the use of SuSE by the free software community. In large part because of the relationship with Microsoft but also because something like Ubuntu is every bit as good a desktop for most users as is SuSE and it has less of the baggage SuSE now has.

On the corporate front it will take time for the deal to play itself out but Novell provides a compelling desktop Linux option in SLED 10 and perhaps together with the assurance of not being sued by Microsoft might well be a good corporate desktop replacement.

For myself, I am sticking with Ubuntu for now.

As for myself, I still run Opensuse at home and at work. I am waiting to see how things develop before I impulsively replace Opensuse with Debian or Fedora Core (just renamed “Fedora”). If it’s not broken, don’t ‘fix’ it, right? Technically, Opensuse is not broken. And yes, the licensing route to the future seems broken already. A couple of weeks ago I noticed the following when doing a whois.net lookup.


Domain Name: FREESUSE.COM
Registrar: BELGIUMDOMAINS, LLC
Whois Server: whois.belgiumdomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.belgiumdomains.com
Name Server: NS-3.WEBSERVERGATOR.COM
Name Server: NS-2.WEBSERVERGATOR.COM
Name Server: NS-1.WEBSERVERGATOR.COM
Status: ACTIVE
EPP Status: ok
Updated Date: 01-Nov-2006
Creation Date: 01-Nov-2006
Expiration Date: 01-Nov-2007


A fork to freedom? Some existing SUSE users would hope so. A willing army of developers and testers may already be prepared to embark on such a project. The endeavour involves maintenance of packages that will evolve elsewhere, in companies that foster innovation and serve as incubators.

Love SuSE/SUSE. Blame Novell.

In the past two days I have stubbornly abstained from silding with this rather extreme perspective, which I perceived as unrealistic. But here we have an opinion piece that earned a place in LinuxToday. Many conservative Linux users appear to see it as reasonable.

Novell will definitely fork any open source software that moves to GPLv3. This is not surprising given that Novell is now being bankrolled by Microsoft. It also appears that Microsoft is willing to fund such forks, in the name of interoperability.

To quote my colleague, “I think it’s realistic, and crazy (on Novell’s part). What this deal is doing, per Microsoft’s terms is saying anyone who wants to hack on the code can, and then give it to Novell only via OpenSuSE.org. Anyone else who redistributes is subject to lawsuit, does Novell really think that the compulsion to code is so great that the community will continue to improve their proprietary code at gunpoint?

The opensuse folks need to leave, en masse, as a signal to Novell that they will need to write their own code (or collaborate with MS) from here on in. Even if they did sidestep GPL2 (which I don’t concede), they will not get around GPL3. This might require a lot of re-writing of code that cannot be relicensed, but maybe that’s the point – to slow down Linux on a massive rewrite so they can catch up with vista 2, since Vista 1 is a trainwreck.”

Another opinion piece from ZDNet Blogs clearly suggests that Red Hat will be able to endure, if not prosper more than ever before. It concludes with the following:

…Oracle may hurt Red Hat, but not nearly as much as you’d think. As for Novell and Microsoft they have their own issues to sort out.

It is encouraging to see that Novell’s mistake hurts its own presence more than it affects other Linux vendors. In fact, judging by all those Linux contracts which are struck so frequently (more latterly the City of Vienna, Dakota, and Nokia), it seems like Novell remains an issue for Eben Moglen to address in GPLv3. In the interim, it’s business as usual for GNU/Linux.

Let Steve Ballmer talk. Let him and Ron Hovspeian continue to “agree to disagree”. When the children are through playing perhaps they can start worrying about their dwindling products again. The only genuine gainer at the moment is (non-SUSE) Linux.

Over the course of the day I have been observing a torrent of good news for Red Hat. This company, which is Novell’s main rival, appears to quickly recover from an almost-simultaneous onslaught, courtesy of Novell, Microsoft, and Oracle. This recovery was not made possible owing to the immediate buybacks alone. Red Hat now boasts support from over 2000 independent software vendors (ISV’s), its stock just rose 2.36% and it received an upgrade from an analyst. To quote the relevant bits:

…we believe that there are still enormous returns on investment opportunities associated with the Open Source movement…The recent announcements from Oracle and Microsoft create an interesting dilemma for investors, however we believe that Dell, IBM and HP, etc., will stay the course and continue to support Red Hat, and the recent headlines have provided a unique opportunity to “get involved” in the Linux story.

This proves not only that Ellison’s and Ballmer’s FUD strategy cannot boggle the customer’s perception. It may also come to show that Red Hat will soon acquire customers at Novell’s expense. Not even the world’s largest software companies, as prominent as they these titans may be, can undermine the Linux industry as a whole. It is by all means reassuring.

The sun no shines over Novell’s head. Ever since the deceptive deal was made, its reputation has been gradually sinking.

Three weeks ago when Novell, Inc. announced a groundbreaking deal to partner with Microsoft to work on interop solutions between its Linux operating system and Microsoft’s, shares jumped 16%. Since then, they have given up more than half of their gains, emphasized yesterday by a note downgrading the stock to “underperform” by Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard, who wrote, “We do not believe the 10% appreciation in the stock is sustainable.”

Microsoft’s parallel upgrade from the same analyst seems to highlight who the winner in this partnership is. Meanwhile, an item from bizjournal.com appears to suggest that Novell has just lost another executive. Less impact for Novell equates to diminishing credence in Microsoft’s allegations and FUD.

It has already been argued that Novell’s Mono had evolved to become a legal minefield. Unsurprisingly, Red Hat excludes Mono from RHEL 5.

There are a lot of great new programs and innovations expected in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The Novell-led Mono project isn’t one of them.

Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework. It recently hit version 1.2 offering the promise of improved Windows-to-Linux .NET portability.