As there were no updates in xd-unstable for a long time now, some people started asking what’s going on. In a mail posted on the xd-testers list, Luis Villa of Ximian, announced that they are droping Red Hat/Fedora support and they are focusing on the product Novell is building around Ximian and SuSE.
Ximian Drops Red Hat & Fedora Support; Focuses on SuSE
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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60 Comments
2004-04-01 1:32 am
2004-04-01 2:19 am
2004-04-01 5:27 am
2004-04-02 1:36 am
2004-04-02 11:18 pm
hmmm… I expected that this will happen. tsk… well at least blue curve is better(IMHO) than the bundled themes in GNOME.
wonder if this is just the “desktop” or evolution etc… as well???
Although there will be screams from the cheap seats, this is a good move by Novell, clearly setting out a plan for a consistant desktop. If it boils down to JDS on one side and Novell Ximian on the other side, I think the Linux desktop will rapidly move forward.
I hope not, I love evolution. No surprise here though, Novell will do what they want with Ximian now. Sad. Hope the linux world doesn’t go the way of Novell. Having big companies get on the bandwagon, buying the successful linux companies and then changing their future support paths. What do you guys think?
If I’m not mistaken, what the referenced posting is actually saying is that *at the moment* Ximian is updating for SUSE 9. The reason given for halting RH/FC updates is that they’re trying to set up a CVS snaps channel for *both* RH/FC and SUSE—a move that, unfortunately, seems to be taking more time than expected.
So, I guess we could expect updates for RH/FC, once the folks over at Ximian finishes consolidating the CVS channel.
“What do you guys think?”
Personally I think Linux is not at the whims of the corporates because of projects like Debian, Slackware and Gentoo which have large followings and yet are not corporate controlled. Novell can do whatever they want, but they can’t dictate the path that Linux is to take for everybody. They might well see Linux as just another product to market, but there are many more who know it (and OSS in general) is something beyond that.
I’m with the guy who said “good”. I love opensource, and part of the beaty of it is, for the most part, it stays free. There is too much competition for it NOT to. Look how many people jumped off RedHat when they stopped offering. And need I remind anyone of YOS? ( http://www.yoper.com/ ) Novell is taking a page out of IBM’s (among others’) book. They know the future is more about selling services then applications. Free software is a logical course, at least where OS’s are concerned.
Suse opened up YaST under Novell’s guidance (yes, I know, it may be a ploy), so here’s hoping more good things will come from it.
“Novell can do whatever they want, but they can’t dictate the path that Linux is to take for everybody.”
True that. This sounds like what Corel tried to do, but that was more of trying to find where the other pot of gold was going to come from to save their ‘a*s’. It wasn’t for the community.
Does this really suprise anyone?
I believe Novell would do well to not support any of its products on anything other then what it owns itself. That doesn’t mean that the products won’t run anywhere else (like Red Hat etc), but I don’t think its smart of Novell to support products on a competitors system.
I think this should be stretched to the Novell services being ported to Linux. It just seems like good business sense that these should be value added products only on its own lines. Besides anything else, I don’t believe Red Hat’s market should use such products anyway. Red Hat is one of the most Open distro’s around, and Novell’s products are proprietary, it just doesn’t seem to fit.
Novell didn’t own SuSE when they announced they would also support Red Hat, I believe they should rethink this. SuSE is becoming the perfect business Linux, companies don’t care about whether everything is Open Source, they just want confidence that it will be a good product. Only the Ximian guys are really behind Open Source at Novell, the SuSE guys have always included closed source software. I think its a good fit, but I think they need to position themselves in such a way that they will profit more. Its just good business sense.
I personally can’t wait to see how this all eventually works out. It seems Novell will be entirely a Linux company, to make money, it seems to me they have to leverage their value added software in such a way to do so. I don’t believe supporting its software on Red Hat is a way to make the most money.
When it comes to open source technoloy, I have always felt it was ok to sell a product using (for example) the Linux kernel. However, one could build a DE and their own graphic server, and all the fixin’s, but as long as they keep Linux (the kernel) free, and distribute the source of it, I’m sure it has done exactly what it has been planned to do. After all, digital watches that run on Linux aren’t free…you have to buy those too.
Like MS Office on Linux????
Sorry
The irony makes me laff!
Personally I find it a good move. Afterall, Novell has to make money.
There is a Linux for every taste and need. Lindows for joe user, Debian or Slackware for geeks and nerds, Novell and Red Hat for corporations.
Then there is Libranet, Knoppix, Mandrake (should they get their acts together) for avearge users.
This makes total sense from Novells point of view. They now have a distribution and a Desktop and the services around it making it a complete solution from Servers to Desktops. After all no other Distribution ‘supports’ other distributions in the sense that they would worry about packaging it for someone else. Novell will continue to release code, but whatever other distributions will do with that code is up to them. Any service provided around Linux will obviously be tailored towards Novells products.
Personally I think Linux is not at the whims of the corporates because of projects like Debian, Slackware and Gentoo which have large followings and yet are not corporate controlled. Novell can do whatever they want, but they can’t dictate the path that Linux is to take for everybody.
It is like that, for now.
If one big Linux company’s DE get something that resembles the dominance windows have in desktop computers in general, things will start to look different, imho. The signs are there with Gnome’s and KDE’s competeing application interfaces. Sure, you can always run the competing project’s applications in your favourite DE if dependencies allow, but it won’t blend perfectly with your other apps and special DE-specific features (tray, etc.) will not work or not work as well.
If/when Linux on the desktop grows big, more money will be at stake and competition in the market will reduce the cooperation and team spirit (we against..) we see today.
I believe the heading of this article to be greatly exaggerating: this is only about XD-*UNSTABLE*. Nobody said the wouldn’t build RH/Fedora packages when it is released.
If this is only about Ximian’s open source applications, it won’t matter. Other distros will simply package the programs themselves.
It may give SUSE an edge because that is your option to get support from the original source. But there’s nothing to stop someone else (e.g. Progeny) from providing support for other distributions.
If this is about proprietary applications, I guess it could get more hairy.
In order to be accepted in enterprise markets Linux will need a force like Novell. But there will always be distro like Debian and Gentoo out there. That is the power of Linux: Freedom of Choice. So don’t complain about this.
that’s a bad move by Novell imho. they gain a business advantage over competitors, but in the long term hurt their reputation in the eyes of OSS supporters.
XD (/evolution?) stopping beeing supported on the (arguably) very popular RH/FD is NOT in the benefit of linux users, and definately not along the line of the original plans of Ximian.
too bad.
Chris and Jaroom got it right. They are not dropping RedHat support. They are concentrating current efforts on getting a Suse channel set up. They plan to support RedHat, Fedora, and Suse.
This will in _no_ way impact use of Evolution or any other Gnome application for anybody. Evolution (or any other Ximaian-originated app) has always been supported and packaged by Redhat for its distro (just like Debain has always packaged it for themselves and so on).
This is about distributiong the Ximian Desktop Gnome distribution, which is arguably a bit redundant on Fedora as it already has one of the best packaged Gnome desktops already.
ibm blue linux
novell suse
sun java desktop
hp does turbolinux ans suse as well
all suse.
grab suse and ximian update to unstable and se whats cooking
Back then ximian did not have a distro, so they bundled their package on top of another distro. Now, if you want their bundle, you just get SUSE. Redhat would not support XD anyway, so not a big loss. GNOME is now good enough to stand on its own. As more of their patches get merged into GNOME it won’t matter anymore. Besides, they are quickly out of date. XD is still at GNOME 2.2.
What some people need to realize that it’s not about Ximian and SuSE anymore, nor is it going to resemble the services they offered. It’s going to be one thing called “Novell”.
Stop making references to what Novell will let SuSE or Ximian do, because, by all definitions — they no longer exist.
Also, stop equating GPL or FOSS as “free” as in no payment, or some obligation to “freely” support all products related to Linux.
The reason why Ximian will not be supported under Red Hat is because there will not be a Ximian “Desktop” anymore — It’s just another element to “Novell” Linux now — like SuSE is.
Do you expect BMW to be in the business of selling BMW branded steering wheels?
As for Evolution — It is GPLed. Think about what you say before complaining that it will be taken away. Use the source and make your own desktop if you feel that this is all wrong.
Like MS Office on Linux????
Sorry
The irony makes me laff!
Why?
MSOffice =>C#
Linux=>Mono=>C#
Conlcusion:
MSOffice=>Linux
Or am I missing something?
Don’t be silly: Evo lacks the only really EXCLUSIVE feature of Outlook!
That’s “Catching Viruses”
Hi, Renato
This site and its misleading headlines are becoming the yellow press of the tech world. Read what the post actually says and it has absolutely nothing to do with what was announced or posted here.
They are dropping CVS snapshots, which very few people run anyway, but they are not dropping Red Hat support.
Aren’t gnome and evolution open source anyway? Even if they completely drop Redhat support, can’t Redhat take up the slack and integrate the pieces themselves?
Ximian has never had wide support in distributions; many times they spent months only supporting Redhat for one of their new versions. Sounds like they just switched from most heavily supporting Redhat to most heavily supporting SuSE, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the whole Novell situation.
But Redhat can still have Gnome and Evolution and even use most of the source from Ximian if they want, someone will just need to make the installer instead of Ximian. Am I wrong?
Is XD2 not fully opensource? Couldn’t other people port it to other distributions? Like Mandrake? or gentoo etc. Is this possible? If so, what I expect, what’s the problem?
Kaiwai: Although there will be screams from the cheap seats, this is a good move by Novell, clearly setting out a plan for a consistant desktop. If it boils down to JDS on one side and Novell Ximian on the other side, I think the Linux desktop will rapidly move forward.
Nope, it is unlikely that Ximian Desktop 2 would become Novell/SuSE’s main desktop. Red Hat pulled out from the consumer and SME market. This is Ximian’s market, they never historically targeted the main enterprise market Red Hat is targeting today (besides the fact that the enterprise market have no use for something like Ximian).
However don’t expect Ximian to become the default desktop on SuSE anytime soon because SuSE’s main asset was their KDE developers and their Qt-based applications (most importantly, YaST). Novell paid much more for SuSE than they did for Ximian, and it is unlikely that they are just wasting money on SuSE for their kernel developers (there are much better catches out there).
sanitys3j: Suse opened up YaST under Novell’s guidance (yes, I know, it may be a ploy), so here’s hoping more good things will come from it.
SuSE open sourced YaST, it remains to see whether YaST would be an open development where SuSE’s competitors can participate. So in other words: Novell didn’t do it because they hold up the virtues of free software.
wowtip: If one big Linux company’s DE get something that resembles the dominance windows have in desktop computers in general, things will start to look different, imho.
Unless Microsoft crashes so hard it would make Enron look like a picnic where it would bankrupt leaving corporations roaming for an altenative and unless someone as cunning and manipulative as Microsoft (not a bad thing) is in the market laughing their ways to the bank, it is extremely unlikely that Linux would ever be monopolized.
Renato: Don’t be silly: Evo lacks the only really EXCLUSIVE feature of Outlook!
That’s “Catching Viruses”
I remember a joke, can’t remember who told it: Outlook is virus bait with emailing features.
But I must invite you to use Outlook 2003 and make your own comparison. You’d be suprised with the amount Outlook does that Evolution doesn’t.
Anonymous: I suggest journalist school, or better yet just get a job you know how to do.
You do realize that Eugenia (nor David or other editors here) are journalist, or are getting paid for this? (The ads are to pay for OSNews’ bills and keep David roaming around continental USA)
First, i’m rally amazed about the FUD sreading everywhere concerning Novell/SuSE/Ximian…. It’s all a big joke. Wait and see; don’t complain before something happened and most of all: don’t tell lies!
@ Rajan R
>> Novell paid much more for SuSE than they did for Ximian,
>> and it is unlikely that they are just wasting money on
>> SuSE for their kernel developers (there are much better
>> catches out there).
The “catch” was a very good one, it’s a) a nice distributen and b) a team of linux experts. Nothing to do with the desktop though
>> But I must invite you to use Outlook 2003 and make your
>> own comparison. You’d be suprised with the amount Outlook
>> does that Evolution doesn’t.
Wow… you are actually a Microsoft manager giving away free licenses to both Windows and Office? If not… How could we ever try Outlook? This is very clear: Microsoft, port Outlook to Linux and make it FREE, then we’ll see…
I tend to agree with Kaiwai, who said “Although there will be screams from the cheap seats, this is a good move by Novell, clearly setting out a plan for a consistant desktop.” Well said. I’m glad that linux companies are getting more serious about buisiness. You guys want a free, integrated Gnome desktop, use Dropline or something.
The headline should be changed, after all it is misleading. That much can’t really be refuted.
XD3 will not support anything but SuSE. I was told this by a Ximian employee not too long ago. It’s not exactly a huge surprise, and to be honest, doesn’t really matter a whole lot – XD2 was excellent, but a recent version of GNOME (2.6 soon!) will give you 90% of what’s in it. The fast release schedule of Fedora means that you can ride the bleeding edge without using XD.
However, this won’t change Evolution, Mono, or whatever being available for non-SuSE desktops, since Ximian wasn’t packaging those for non-XD systems to begin with.
I do agree with the other posters that the blurb is somewhat misleading.
-Erwos
There was another article on the Heise newsticker today where they respond to an email Nat Friedmann sent them. Basically they say, Nat Friedmanns mail is not a counterstatement to their previous article and that Friedmann claims that the choice of desktop is the least important one and that things like improved imteroperability with Windows, the distribution of the Linux plattform to more developers and ISVs, improvement of usability and simplification of migration from Windows are the most important aspects.They also claim that Novell is negotiating with Trolltech. They also say that, after the decision in favour of Qt a lot of discussions and friction happend and still happens between developpers at Novell. If you are able to read German, have a look at: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/46148 for the whole article.
Either the Heise people are gone totally crazy or they actually have some facts which other people, especially people here, don’t know.
My personal opinion is, that Novell is negotiating with Trolltech and that they will make some deal like Novell pays some amount of money for every distribution sold and the Novell customers are alowed to develop commercial applications with Qt for free. A lot of big companies already use Qt (probably on Windows) and Novell targets these people and want to migrate them to Linux and so Qt seems the natural choice for that.
Thx Michael, perhaps I should start reading Heise again these days…
Seriously, Heise should stop what they are doing currently, it has nothing to do with professional journalism. It’s obvious that currently noone can say anything for sure so why make speculations and wild assumptions based on semi-official statements of people that have nothing to say but a personal interest in the outcome (like ex-SuSE / ex-Ximian employees). And where exactly did they hear now that Novell thinks about buying Trolltech? Names, please… I think this is made up as Heise seems to be very KDE-centric. Wait and see…
I still don’t get why people take this so emotional. Wait and see. Two or three days ago people from the KDE fraction were calling Nad a lier because of his title – now it seems save to say that he actually IS leader of desktop development, even Heise calls him “Desktop-Chefentwickler”.
So once again I ask everyone to calm down.
…it is extremely unlikely that Linux would ever be monopolized.
Yes, a monopoly is not really what I meant, but when I now read what I wrote, it really look like I am saying that situation is what I think is going to happen.
If I may clarify, my thought is that it doesn’t even take that much of a advantage for one of the competing DEs to get into the upward spiral where each new user adopting the DE is another boost which in turn lead to even more users going the same way. Something like Linux’ critical mass people used to talk about a couple of years ago.
Funky the Heise article says that Novell and Trolltech are negotiating and that both didn’t generally deny that Novell might buy Trolltech…
Interesting times in DesktopLinuxLand for sure.
Actually Heise is not KDE centric. There have been 3 news about KDE on the Heise Newsticker in the last 7 days, 7 about Linux, 2 about GNOME and for example 17 about Microsoft (I only searched for KDE, GNOME, Linux and Microsoft in the titles). Usually they have less news about KDE or GNOME, I would be surprised if they mention KDE or GNOME more then once a week, proabaly they usually mention them more like once a month if at all.
You can blame Heise that it is two Windows-centric. Most of their news concern Windows, most of the stories in the c’t are tests of windows software or some other windows stuff. But I guess that is just because most of the people are using windows and that is their audience, so you cannot really blame them for that;-) I guess they report a little bit more about KDE then about GNOME just because more people in Germany are using KDE then using GNOME but that is still negligible compared to the amount of windows stories and tests they have.
Unfortunatelly the Heise article did not say where they got their informations from, but still I think it is very unlikely that they made up this whole story.
Nx: The “catch” was a very good one, it’s a) a nice distributen and b) a team of linux experts. Nothing to do with the desktop though
Most of SuSE’s engineers are focusing on the desktop – and guess what? SuSE’s desktop of choice is KDE. Novell/SuSE has no less than 10 full-time engineers working on KDE during company hours. The fact that their jobs don’t seem to be threaten doesn’t matter much to you, no?
Meanwhile, Ximian have been lately placing more and more of its eggs in the Mono basket. I’m sure if Mono could be sold today, Ximian wouldn’t bother much with GNOME anymore. Why Novell bought Ximian? Who else have a more complete .NET Framework implementation, other than Microsoft themselves? $20+ million for Mono seems like a good buy for Novell.
Wow… you are actually a Microsoft manager giving away free licenses to both Windows and Office? If not… How could we ever try Outlook? This is very clear: Microsoft, port Outlook to Linux and make it FREE, then we’ll see…
I never said Evolution isn’t good. Take a look at the original quote, Renato said that Evolution is comparable with Outlook feature-per-feature. I disagreed. This has nothing to do with price. Don’t find Outlook affordable and the platform of your choice? So what? Believe me, I couldn’t care what you use – Evolution, Outlook, Mozilla, whatever.
But even if Ximian paid you to use Evolution, it doesn’t discount the fact that Outlook has more features than Evolution and thus Renato’s statement is wrong.
Nx: Seriously, Heise should stop what they are doing currently, it has nothing to do with professional journalism.
Pray tell, what is professional journalism? Seeing that putting pieces together by investigative journalism isn’t professional, however dishing out press release isn’t, it does seem like the entire journalistic world is against you on this one. Especially since journalism hallmarks like Bob Woodward and his source Deep Throat in the Watergate Scandal is based around investigative journalism, not Whitehouse press statements.
Nx: And where exactly did they hear now that Novell thinks about buying Trolltech?
Where exactly in the Heiss article did they say Novell is buying Trolltech?
Nx: So once again I ask everyone to calm down.
Same to you, Nx, same to you.
…about certain members of the open source “community”. So ximian has stopped releasing rpm’s for redhat. So what? You’ve still got the source. They are obligated in no way to make YOU packages. Stop whining, pining, bitching and package the software yourselves.
Damn Right.
Slackware Forever.
Unfortunately, the current status is that we’re only updating for SUSE 9. We’re trying to get a CVS snaps channel set up for both RH/FC and SUSE, to replace the more manual/labor-intensive xd-unstable channels, but this has proven more time consuming than we’d hoped.
I’m sorry we did not communicate this earlier- obviously when Novell bought SuSE, our long-term plans with regards to supporting RH as a platform changed as well. We still want to help gnome testing on RH (since they won’t do it themselves
but it won’t be via xd-unstable in the future, just CVS snaps.
Luis
If you’re making a product, one would think the best marketing strategy would be to make it as easy as possible for everyone to use. Not making packages for XD-Unstable is cutting off one distribution channel.
For the relative success of these two strategies – “If you want to use this product you must use this other product of ours, too” vs. “We’d like everyone to use our stuff” – see Apple vs. Microsoft.
Why does it matter? Suse is LSB compliant.
As long as Red Hat maintains LSB compliancy it shouldn’t matter. The same can be said wrt Gnome and KDE and the freedesktop project.
If everyone meets the spec, support shouldn’t matter. It should “just work”.
Soem people suggest that Novell XD2 will be a separate product, not a default desktop of Novell SUSE Linux.
If this is correct, it doesn’t make business sense to reduce your market by not supporting RH.
On the other hand if Novell XD2 is indeed focusing on SUSE Linux, a very logical conclusion is that XD2 will not be a separate product and they will have it as their default desktop on Novell SUSE Linux. That will also explain their numerous GNOME activities lately through the GNOME bounties.
Interesting thought, isn’t it.
@Rayanr:
How many GNOME hackers do you think are under Novells payroll?
I agree. Novell should concentrate it’s efforts on Suse. If you’re a real Linux user why would you be worried about propriety code. It won’t last. There are enought people out there through the Linux and other *NIX communities that nothing of real value will last long in “proprietary lockup.”
I say make Suse offerings even better. They should be portable, but if not, and they’re good, someone will port them.
Although what I said about Ximian is true, they do back Open Source in a substantial way, Ximian Desktop does indeed include closed source applications – thus it would appear to an even better fit…
Ximian and SUSE appear to be the main Linux based companies marrying Open Source and Proprietary software. Most Linux companies appear to be very against this however. This appears to fit very well with Novell’s current philosophy.
This is perhaps the primary reason for OSI vs GNU, Open Source is great, but GNU’s philosophy will never hold strong in a business environment. Companies and End Users in general could give a damn whether the programs they use are open source, they probably can’t program anyways so it does them very little good. They want software that does what they need in a clean and intuitive way, they care about nothing else. This appears to be exactly what Novell wants to offer.
I won’t be starting to use Novell software until there plans are more clear to me (for one, this single GNOME/KDE desktop, I have seen nothing about what exactly that means), but I certainly can see myself switching in the future (from Debian) if I like the directions they take. So far I like what they appear to be heading towards, it seems simular to what makes OS X attractive to me.
Going off topic a little, I would really like to see Novell purchase Codeweavers. I believe this would be a great move for everyone. Novell has the noteriety to convince some major companies to port software through Wine to Linux which I think would be great for the Linux desktop in general. Novell are the only ones in the Linux distro area that this really makes sense for, others just don’t have the name or noteriety to make a convincing argument. Novell has asserted that it may make more smaller purchases to strengthen its desktop offerings. In my opinion Codeweavers would be a perfect fit. Who knows, maybe if they own Codeweavers, it would be included in SUSE Professional rather then the insanely priced SUSE Desktop!
One can wish…
Ximian may eventually end up dropping XD support for RH/Fedora, but this certainly isn’t the announcement of that. Luis is talking about the xd-unstable Red Carpet Channel, which provides packages for testing what will eventually become XD3, *not* the final product (note that XD2 is not available for Fedora – other than some of the printer management integration in nautilus and ooo, there is little value-added over the stock version of GNOME in FC1, and much of XD2 would be a regression).
Note also that this message indicates that the xd-unstable channels will no longer be used — even for SuSE — once they get the cvs snapshot channels up for “both RH/FC and SUSE”.
As far as what the statement “our long-term plans with regards to supporting RH as a platform changed as well” means, that remains to be seen, particularly since he follows up with “We still want to help gnome testing on RH”. I suspect he means that the bulk of their development will focus on SuSE as their primary platform, and that SuSE gets preferred attention.
Whether the final Ximian Desktop 3 gets rolled up entirely as “Novell/SuSE’s GNOME desktop” and ceases to be targeted to multiple distros .
That is, according to Chris Schlaeger, vice president, Research and Development.
http://linuxtoday.com/it_management/2004033102626NWDTNV
My posts were not off topic, can’t take criticism? LOL Typical
Will they “drop” support or continue to not include it in a loss-leader product? Has SuSE Personal Edition *ever* come with GNOME?
http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse_linux/i386/personal.ht…
Funny that the link your provide says so!
What’s that hanging below KDE 3.1.4 in the left panel? I see Gnome 2.2
SUSE personal edition always included Gnome, it’s no longer the case now.
That is, according to Chris Schlaeger, vice president, Research and Development.