LinuxWorld Conference and Expo began this morning at the Javits Center in New York City with a keynote address by Jack Messman, chairman of the board and CEO of Novell. Novell, Messman noted, is a billion-dollar company that’s wagering its future on open source, with the acquisitions in the past year of Ximian and SuSE. Linux convert Novell proclaimed its strong support for open-source programming Wednesday, but made the case for a pragmatic approach that blends in its own proprietary applications.
Novell CEO Keynote at LWCE Promises Open Source Contributions
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
one of the top distros will be bundeling proprietary software and nobody seems to care. Are we suppose to pretend this is OK or something? Did i miss a meeting?
I hate to break it to you, but most of the good apps out there are closed source, I doubt if they were going to be ported to Linux they are going to magically change their mind and open-source them. There isn’t any money in selling something that someone can just get the source for and compile, Red Hat has learned that lessen, that’s why they gave their open source free version away as Fedora. Your going to have to face facts that not everything is going to be free, and that closed and open sources apps will have to blend themselves together.
Well Red Hat like you mentioned seemed to be doing okay, the company finally had its first profit and is in the neighborhood of 1 billion. They do not have any propriatary software. Neither does Debian, gentoo, or slackware. SuSe is the only one playing this game. (other than some desktop startups)
I don’t think you’re right that everyone will be moving to this model. Some will make thier model completly of OSS software, there is room for money there just not room for many. Novell is f**king up linux, sorry. Things were fine before they showed up. Now everyone is going to have to lock in tools to compete that means there would have been no RPM, no apt, no anaconda, no kudzu, no NPTL unless you bought from Debian (apt) or Red Hat (the rest).
“I hate to break it to you, but most of the good apps out there are closed source”
is it so?
bsd tcp/ip stack – all mainstream operating systems including windows
apache web server – near 70% market share
bind dns server – 90 %
sendmail – 80%
the above are not good apps by any means?
There’s nothing wrong with developers selling end user closed source for-profit apps. Whats important is that the platform the apps run on remains open and free from monopoly or cartel control so that *everyone* will have an opportunity to compete. The next 18-24 months will tell the tale as to whether or not the corps are supporters of open source.
@pros:
“Novell is f**king up linux, sorry. Things were fine before they showed up.”
How exactly is Novell selling things that run on the Linux Kernel “f**king” it up. Might you not say the same about IBM, Oracle, Lotus, Sybase, SAP and thousands of other commercial, closed source supporters of Linux?
OS’s should be open commodities with little or no price tag attached, but the application stack has so many different things that need to be done, there has to be *some* incentive to develop for. In other words, everyone needs an OS and therefore economies of scale can prevail to force the price down to $0. Not everyone though needs a multie billion object directory service, so to attract the substantial R&D investment, there must be some promise of a payoff.
Might you not say the same about IBM, Oracle, Lotus, Sybase, SAP and thousands of other commercial
No. 3rd party applications are fine. It is ‘bundling’ them in that ‘free os’ you mentioned. Those 3rd party applications should run on all LSB systems. Not just SuSe or Red Hat. Novell has stated early on they may cut off other distros (atleast red hat) in the future. This is not competition when _nobody_ else does it, this is vender lockin’s which is why many of us switch from windows in the first place. Granted they haven’t done that yet, but they should give us something for piece of mind. open connecter, yast, novell directory stuff.. something.
@Bitterman…
If Novell did say that then I would tend agree with you. But my recollection is that they would only certify their products to run on certain distributions, being SuSE and RH Enterprise.
This is a fair position to take. How many LSB compliant distros are there out there? 50-100? Certification requires that they thoroughly test on the target platform, and if a customer has problems how do you help resolve it?
Still, if SuSE is LSB compliant, and lets say eDirectory is certified to run on SuSE with at least kernel 2.4.2x, plus some other requirements/dependencies, then there is nothing to say that it won’t run on DistroX meeting those same requirements. However, if you have a problem, then Novell support may not be able to resolve your problem…
many guys still believe pure open source can save all their asses. wat a joke!
If Novell did say that then I would tend agree with you. But my recollection is that they would only certify their products to run on certain distributions, being SuSE and RH Enterprise.
Obviously, now that we own the [SUSE Linux] distribution, we have to potentially rethink that, but as of right now, our customers have been asking for both.
That statement was made by the Vice Chairman of Novell on weather netware will _run_ on RH. My problem with that is how its ‘obvious’ to them they shouldn’t have thier application run on a competitors system. Is this the beginning of what we seen with unix? if you want eDirctory you have go with novell, if you want Red Hats foobar 2000 you have to buy from them. Before all this it didn’t matter who you bought from. you had the sourcecode to all of them (except yast but who cares). “hey that company made a cool app, lets port the source code to our distro” no problem there.
Maybe one of these two guys should buy out code weavers and be the only one to run office that would be great wouldnt it? Sorry to sound like an alarmist but this is the first time we’re being challenged with a ‘hybred’ distro.
“Might you not say the same about IBM, Oracle, Lotus, Sybase, SAP and thousands of other commercial”
No. 3rd party applications are fine. It is ‘bundling’ them in that ‘free os’ you mentioned. Those 3rd party applications should run on all LSB systems. Not just SuSe or Red Hat. Novell has stated early on they may cut off other distros (atleast red hat) in the future. This is not competition when _nobody_ else does it, this is vender lockin’s which is why many of us switch from windows in the first place. Granted they haven’t done that yet, but they should give us something for piece of mind. open connecter, yast, novell directory stuff.. something.
Perish the f**cking thought! a company giving the customer value for money! I demand the EVERY is sold seperately resulting in a server costing $10,000,000!
Get a life and grow a brain. If it isn’t the BeOS crowd whinging that their half baked operating system wasn’t loaded onto Compaq computers its the Linux crowd claiming that there is a conspiracy against them and that OEMs are against Linux.
btw, if you don’t like the bundled software, then don’t bloody use it! buy a server from SUN loaded with Solaris and their Java Enterprise System and bloody well done with it. I run MacOS 10.3, bundled with it comes Safari, I MAKE THE CHOICE not to run it and instead use Mozilla, I MAKE THE CHOICE to use MSN Messenger over using iChat.
I am an adult and I think I am quite capable of making my own bloody choices. I certainly don’t want some so-called “linux supporter” claiming that I have been brainwashed and there for, the operating system should be stripped of all bundled applications.
Heck, using that logic, Red Hat should stop selling their distribution with XFree86 because it is unfair to XIG or Solaris should stop selling Solaris with PPPD because it would be unfair to MorningStar software.
Microsoft got the marketshare in the Office Suite, Internet Browser market fair and square. They got there by creating a product that work vs. Netscape which crashed constantly, or in the Office suite front where it took 7 years for the numerous components to come together under “corel Wordperfect Suite” to atleast offer some sort of suite for the end user.
The competition screwed themselves, they only have themselves to blame.
Below is thje full text of that quote, which puts things in a more encouraging light. Can you seriously believe that Novell has the market clout to say to their customers “Screw you. You can’t run RH and our software”. They are just not big enough to do that. Also, you can bet that if enough corporations came to them and said that they were or wanted to run Debian, then Novell would support that distro too.
Your point in regards to fragmentation is well taken though.
What does this mean for running NetWare on Red Hat Enterprise Linux? We still do that. We still certify the NetWare services on Red Hat 3.0 as well as on SUSE. Obviously, now that we own the [SUSE Linux] distribution, we have to potentially rethink that, but as of right now, our customers have been asking for both. There’s no technical reason that we shouldn’t provide at least an option if you want to run it on Red Hat. But we’re obviously going to lead with SUSE.
Perish the f**cking thought! a company giving the customer value for money! I demand the EVERY is sold seperately resulting in a server costing $10,000,000!
I have zero problems with a company making money, of open source or propriatry software. Its how they go about it. For instance I just got in my mail that Red Hat just aquired Sistina Software in early January and they have already announced it will be open as GPL.
http://www.redhat.com/mktg/sistina/
In the same press relese they give eCos copywrites to the free software foundation.
http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2004/press_eCosFSF.html
still in the same press relese they have the first OSS appplication server with new technology.
ftp://ftp.redhat.com
Noticing a trend yet? Should they have kept all of this for themselvs and said “If you want this you have to buy ours” no, they gave it to everyone.
It is your right to support what you want, but its also my right to buy what I want and I see more benifit in the long run by sticking with the OSS community, not alienating them.
Yes I know RH will still be supported “as of now” like the VP stated. Because like you said they don’t have the clout. But I don’t like the signials being sent. Cause it speaks volumes of how they will act in the future should thier foothold get stronger. The sky isn’t falling. I was just getting some thoughts out there because its enough to affect my decision on which OS’s to deploy or suggest for use.
Understood. But the same holds true for every commercial vendor supporting Linux. It’s not just limited to Novell. Heck, I can’t get a certified driver for some HP storage gear unless it is for RH…
Also – Novell does understand the value of opensource. You can read about their efforts to date at http://developer.novell.com/ndk/qstart/opensource.htm
Alright I spent 20 minutes going through that page, it seems like a source forge type of site right, looking for contributers?
I found a downloads page
http://developer.novell.com/ndk/downloadaz.htm
out of the 70ish apps up there 6 are ‘open source’ and those are apache for netware
perl for netware
rsync for netware, etc
Anything they do is ‘novell supported’
Perhaps i’m mis-interpreting that, In any case this is gone on long enough I just think they need to re-evaluate ALOT to be successfull in this new business.