Sam Hiser interviews Novell’s Chris Stone about Linux, Ximian, strategy and more.
A Baker’s Dozen from Novell’s Chris Stone
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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A baker’s dozen is 13.. Not 14. Anyway, not many interesting points in this. Just a little into their strategy (which seems to still be developing). Also, I had issues with the link being broken too. I had to click it multiple times for their server to respond.
Chris Stone seems very atypical compared to the Ballmer’s, McNealy’s, and Fink’s of the world. His answers seemed completely honest, and even humorous. He never said a single negative word regarding competitors. No, “Redhat sux0rz!”, “Sun has an inherently backward grandmother,” or “Microsoft slaughtered my dog and is managed by Goldstein!”
I hope everything goes well for Novell, they seem to me to be Good People(tm) which is a rarity today.
Well, he did mention Mordor and Sauron – I can’t imagine he was referring to anyone other than Microsoft.
It was good to get a feel for what parts of Netware are moving to Linux (I haven’t touched Netware is about 8 years, so I’m not familiar with all the branding now – eDirectory is NDS?)
Any Novell folks out there want to give a brief ProductB used to be called ProductA but can now do X,Y&Z?
Well, he did mention Mordor and Sauron – I can’t imagine he was referring to anyone other than Microsoft.
Good point, but it was still more humorous than anything. Not like HP’s,
[Sun has] a fundamentally broken business model. Sun is trying to play its cards in too many places. They’re defocused. They’re making irrational, emotional decisions.
actually, I think that HP’s statment is more profecional. HP did not paint Sun as some evil being, all they did was say they suck at running a business, which is a statement that happens all the time in the business world.
I enjoyed the interview as well.
E-Directory is the current iteration of Novell Directory Services. The products have evolved considerably since NetWare 4.1.
Are you kidding me? I’d buy a Novell/Ximian/SUSE product before even contemplating Java Desktop.
A long time i worked with Netware – ran very well. Has anyone seen papers comparing their Novell Directory Services to open source products like Open Ldap? I have a feeling a lot of companies will like this NDS / Linux combo. Could Mysql/Postgresql databases also be tied into NDS for authentication? hmm, yeah, i should start researching
Novell has a whitepaper on this topic, not sure how biased it is… it doesn’t mention SUN’s…
http://developer.novell.com/whitepapers/ldap/lineup.html
Normally, I wouldn’t be very hopeful. To me, at first, the Novell buys (Ximian, SuSE) seemed like ways to ride the Linux bandwagon since Netware as a platform has been in steady decline for about a century (and for good reason, IMO).
But then I remembered who Ximian and SuSE are… and I realized that if managers at Novell know their asses from their elbows (and know the old adage: “managing programmers is like trying to herd cats”), they’ll just give the two groups common direction, have their existing Netware team move all the services to Linux, and see what happens at the end.
I think Ximian and SuSE both know what corporate users want. And both groups had extremely talented programmers and engineers. The question is whether Novell’s management knows the right thing to do: give them money and make _no decisions for them_. They will know what to do.
The article did have one good point, though: SuSE developers do seem to like KDE more than Gnome… there’s an interesting conflict there. But if everyone is levelheaded about it, it could just mean that Novell’s Linux will have excellent KDE support even though it’s a Gnome desktop (whatever you do, just don’t commit the BLUECURVE blunder!).
I suspect that Novell will allow Suse to release their OS as their OS for a while and use the Base Suse system striping out the KDE stuff, then integreate Ximina into it very well and the Novell software and sell that as a seperate product intheir Novell NOS products.
To hear why someone would spend the extra hundred dollars on XDE when it hardly seems much different from Gnome.
As for your opinion that NetWare is in a justified decline, I say that is unfair … what are the merits of your argument that NetWare is a “bad” or “old” product…just because it doesn’t have a pretty gui and it was never meant for a workstation?
The only reason why NetWare got into trouble is because application developers couldn’t easily port applications. Applications did run well on Novell, but as their market share decreased and their API stagnated – no one wanted to write for Novell, it was perceived as so last year… With a decreasing number of relevant applications, the OS may as well not exist. It is not the level of technological achievement that is the problem, it’s the opinion of people who purchase products.
If everyone declares a company dead and doesn’t buy their products than that is what happens. I think this is what will happen with SUN (unless a miracle happens), not because of any lack in technology, but because it is generally perceived as being less new and hip then Linux and Microsoft’s .net… that is what new is to techs who read stupid trade magazines… Java is so last year, .net rooolz, and Linux is way cooler than dumb old UNIX.
The decline of NetWare had nothing to do with technology, it has more to do with developers who wrote for Microsoft’s API and Microsoft’s ability to push their operating system and office products onto end users. Microsoft’s products where not only seen as new and cool, but you had to have them in order to inter-operate with other companies and users that had Microsoft at home.
When everyone switched over their networks to Microsoft they realized that it took more hardware to run the same services. They also found that it cost more because of the licensing (or at least myself and everyone that I have spoken to about it.)
Now Solaris is being perceived as old and crufty in the UNIX world by a bunch of college grads and wannabe network admins, and Linux is considered uber cool and new. When in fact, Solaris for 1 and 2 way systems is considerably cheaper than comparable Linux enterprise products.
The people that have past experience with UNIX see Linux as just another UNIX with heavy zealot backing. Linux is great if you want to run a bunch of free applications, but most of those applications already run on other UNICES anyway … commercial applications already have better support on closed source UNIX, and Linux certainly isn’t free for most businesses. (unless of course you have a kernel hacker working in house that refuses to use tech support because he considers himeself the true ultra Linux nerd who can only look for help on the Internet, based mainly on the principal that Linux should be free and carries around a tattered copy of the GNU manifesto like a holy writ)
It is all about perception, soon I will be hearing about how Solaris died and rightly so… why again is that? Because Solaris it is technically more advanced and costs less… ?? Once again, people’s perception of a technology or product is more important than reality.
I am glad, I don’t have to use ugly *** Gbne.