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Member since:
2006-02-02
Please don't associate me too closely with the FSF.
Fair enough.
That said, Novell has a track record of buying Open-Source companies and opening up certain portions of the code, like YAST, which had value to the original company, but little value to them, while keeping their own closed source code close to their chests, proudly proclaiming their mixed-source status.
Novell has the best directory service, and the best identity management tools out there. They may still have the best desktop management package (Zenworks), I haven't looked at it recently.
I don't blame them for not giving those up.
Don't forget that openSuSE (the reason for this thread) didn't really exist prior to Novell-- You had two options for SuSE linux, buy the box (I have several), or install from FTP with zero support. You want ISO's? Tough.
Now we have the openSuSE distro, the SLES distro, the SLED distro, and the under-appreciated SuSE Build Service, which currently builds packages for SuSE, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva and Ubuntu.
I put Balmer and Hovsepian in pretty much the same category. Except that Balmer has the much stronger hand of cards. If I were Hovsepian, I'd feel pretty desperate at this point. And I probably wouldn't care if I had to damage Linux to save Novell. *If* I were Hovsepian, that is.
Novell is too dependent on Linux to jeopardize it. Damage to Linux *IS* damage to Novell.
It's conceivable they could patch up the various closed-source projects and make them run on top of *BSD, but NSS (very nice filesystem) relies on EVMS, and to my knowledge, EVMS doesn't run under *BSD. Not a total show stopper, but would certainly bring OES deployments to a screeching halt until it was fixed.
Their current "official" support for the old NetWare 6.5 kernel is to run it in a domU Xen instance-- again, doable under *BSD, but not easily-- the BSD port of Xen is apparently poorly maintained currently.
I can't come up with a single scenario wherein Novell and Linux don't have common interests, and common enemies-- at least, not one that doesn't require excessive amounts of tinfoil.