WSJ: VMware To Buy Novell's Linux Business
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 19th Sep 2010 19:05 UTC, submitted by sjvn
Novell and Ximian Novell has been pretty much for sale for six months, and now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Novell's Linux business may be bought by VMware. Novell's other assets, which includes Novell Netware, will then be bought by a private-equity backed software company called Attachmate Corp.
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Notes on a potential VMware purchase of SUSE
by znmeb on Sun 19th Sep 2010 22:38 UTC
znmeb
Member since:
2010-09-19

I'm a huge fan of openSUSE, the openSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio. I've built three appliances, I run openSUSE 11.3 on my workstation and laptop, and I'm hoping whoever buys SUSE will increase investment in these technologies, not kill them. From what I've read, VMware isn't the only potential acquirer, and some of the other names I've heard seem more likely to kill it off as a competitor rather than invest in it. So I'm on the lookout for a plan B, just in case.

"It'll be interesting to see how VMware is going to handle SUSE. I think SUSE lost most of its shine due to the rather schizophrenic approach by Novell (pushing GNOME so hard), so hopefully, VMware will be able to polish it up a bit."

Well, I don't think that's quite accurate. I can't speak about SLES or SLED - I don't use them - but openSUSE has since 11.2 made the KDE desktop the default, not GNOME. And all of the desktops - KDE, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE and even IceWM - integrate nicely, they all have an "openSUSE branding", and they all "make sense" to a Windows user in a way that most of the other community distros' desktops don't. Novell's integration with OpenOffice.org and Firefox is nice, too. In any event, they certainly don't "push GNOME" and they certainly don't seem "schizophrenic" to me.

But really - it's the release engineering, the build service and the SUSE Studio that have me sold on openSUSE. Please, VMware, if you do buy this, invest in it, don't kill it!

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net/2010/07/07/smartznmeb-status-update-roa...

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." - Paul Erdos

Reply Score: 2

lemur2 Member since:
2007-02-17

I can't speak about SLES or SLED - I don't use them - but openSUSE has since 11.2 made the KDE desktop the default, not GNOME.


This point about openSuSe is true now, but it wasn't for a while.

SLES and SLED are heavy pushers of GNOME/Mono. Mono is effectively a dependency in order to run either of those, and Mono contains two parts ... it contains a C#, GTK#, CLI etc part which are open standards, and it also contains ports of ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Winforms, which are Microsoft proprietary technologies for which no "promise" exists.

There really is not place for the latter on any freedom software server or desktop.

SLES and SLED are not freedom software, they are proprietary (server and desktop respectively) OSes, with full-blow restrictive EULAs and the like. There is really no need to subject yourself to this, just don't use SuSe.

Edited 2010-09-19 23:08 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 0

znmeb Member since:
2010-09-19

There is a fair amount of Mono integration in the openSUSE desktops as well. My impression was that what was in SLES and SLED was first released in openSUSE and then incorporated in SLES/SLED.

Now that I think about it, I wonder why there isn't a "community respin" of SUSE Linux Enterprise, analgous to CentOS, Oracle Linux, Scientific Linux and the other respins from the Red Hat source RPMs.

Reply Parent Score: 1

nt_jerkface Member since:
2009-08-26

SLES and SLED are heavy pushers of GNOME/Mono. Mono is effectively a dependency in order to run either of those, and Mono contains two parts ... it contains a C#, GTK#, CLI etc part which are open standards, and it also contains ports of ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Winforms, which are Microsoft proprietary technologies for which no "promise" exists.


Not only that but some Novell programs were built with Winforms.

I also find it funny that both you and I were voted down in this thread.

If MS really wanted to bring .net to Linux they would have done it themselves, and more importantly they would have started with OSX. Though I am a fan of .net Miguel reminds me of a kid who wants to hug a tiger because it looks soft and furry.

MS has been very clear that only C# and the CLI are ECMA standards and within the community promise. Miguel and Novell made a huge mistake in cloning Winforms and other proprietary components of .net. Since .net was already moving to WPF MS probably didn't care at the time and thought it might be useful for future leverage. With ASP.NET MS can just tie newer versions to Windows Server. MS is keenly aware that developers like myself who use ASP.NET want the latest version and want to run it on the platform that it is designed for. ASP.NET on Linux is solution that no one is asking for.

Reply Parent Score: 3

BluenoseJake Member since:
2005-08-11

There certainly is a place for them on my OSS desktop, and my server, if I so choose.

I'm not sure what this "Freedom Software" you keep talking about is, but by telling people what does and doesn't belong on their desktop, or in their distro, you are trying to restrict peoples freedom to choose. Doesn't sound like "Freedom Software" to me.

That's what OSS is about, choice.

Reply Parent Score: 2