In the latest episode of LugRadio, they discuss whether the involvement of large corporations, such as Novell, is a good thing for open source software. It gets quite heated, as two sides emerge – one that hates corporatism, and the other that can’t see a future without a more professional approach.
Novell’s involvement in open source – good or bad?
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Eugenia Loli
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good or bad? I say good.
Novell has the resources(in the form of money, coders etc…) to do OSS a world of good. I’m writing this from the eval version of Novell Linux Desktop. Very, very nice. It has lots of polish in just the right places, I plan on buying the full version. To date I’ve never before bought a linux distro.
Novell’s committment to open source and Linux is exactly the type of news that should warm the hearts of OSS advocates everywhere who would like to see Linux grow in market share.
Corporate funding of an already fantastic code-base will only accelerate its quality and acceptance in the marketplace.
In a free market, everybody wins. These people who hate Novell, Microsoft, Sun, etc. are simply bias based on their anti-market, anti-corporate, anti-freedeeom-of-choice of consumers and quite frankly, are clueless.
I think it’s a good thing for any corporation to involve itself in. It can be looked at so many different ways–from a corporation capitalizing on the open source stuff, for its own monetary gain (this would be a bad view), to a corporation conceding that they don’t have to be all about greed. It depends on who spins it and what the spin is.
It’s a little hard to shake the idea, in my mind, that it’s a sign of moderation and concern for what the public thinks. No corporation wants to appear bad in the eyes of the public, so they make concessions. On the other hand, there are those within a corporation who definitely want their opponents to realize the corporation isn’t a bad one. They have thoughts of employees having to raise kids, put food on the table, and make a living. A compromise, in every sense of the word, can be seen with corporations playing in the open source field.
In terms of longevity and options, a corporation with ventures on the capitalist side and the open source or free side seems like a good idea. Diversification like this can set the stage for innovation. There may also be room for those who program something under a more stringent GPL to get paid by a corporation and consider it ‘freelance’. There can be several symbiotic relationships of this type, leaving one to be free enough that he’s not working for the corporation, yet being paid by it when his program is used.
–EyeAm
http://s87767106.onlinehome.us
it’s a company, nothing else. And a company is nearly everytime bad for a opensource world.
Hopefully, Novell becomes better in supporting to make money. I know the Novell consults for our company really good, they don’t know everything about Novell Groupwise, Netware Client, NW Cluster, Bordermanager…
Corporate involvement is robbing linux of its key USP — configurability and the fact that you get a living, dynamic computer + OS rather than a hard-wired machine that you have to stare ahead blankly and keep typing.
Novell has already bitten the GNOME minimalistic bullet by putting an excellent SuSE KDE desktop to its grave (now don’t tell me this is not true for if you have tried the new NLD you can see that they’ve spent considerable energy tuning the GNOME version but lets KDE to fend for itself).
My interest in linux grew since it was infinitely configurable and yet secure and stable. So, why was there a need to go the “Microsoft” way by giving a bland (a.k.a. consistent and minimal) desktop for corporate use? KDE can be easily merged with any existing office network and is as good a desktop for work (ask me, i’ve been using it for my own research for years now) as any out there. However, for some strange reason, corporate america is pushing for a Microsoft-like bland desktop …. and I see Novell leading that pack.
Other than this, Novell is welcome to the OSS party.
There are quite nice developer pages on novell.com you could enter by signing upp at no cost. They are really nice, even if it is obvious that you are exposed to a fair amount of Novell propaganda. I’ve f.ex downloaded a windows version of OpenLDAP that I’ve been playing with. I recommend the networking coders here to check it out if you haven’t done so already!
Good for me that I can experiment with different products and good for them if I choose to sign a support contract if I sell my product with it.
your whole reason for not liking what novell is doing holds no water.
“My interest in linux grew since it was infinitely configurable and yet secure and stable.”
very true… and because of that, you don’t need to use novell’s desktop. very simple. it’s like turning the tv off or changing the channel when you don’t like what’s on.
i welcome novell because they will pay developers to continue to develop. with the gpl, etc, all will reap the benefits of their labor. you don’t need to use their desktop/distribution. heck, that’s what you _love_ about linux/oss anyway.
it’s a company, nothing else. And a company is nearly everytime bad for a opensource world.
What are you talking about? Lot’s of companies are regularly putting updates back in to the source. One of the nice things about open-source is that it doesn’t matter who the code comes from, if it’s good, we’ll make use of it just the same.
If someone can make money off of open-source software, then it means that same someone is very likely to be puttin money back in to the development of open-source software. If their improvements are good, we keep them. If they’re bad, we can toss them out. How is that bad?
If Novell were to act as a force on other software firms and device makers to open source their apps and drivers, then I’d see that as positive. I don’t expect Novell would open source security enhancements, but I would expect them to use their corporate status to defend the OSS/FS movement generally. It’s too early to tell yet, but I don’t see any reason to be optimistic that Novell will be a positive influence.
Depends on if you see open source as a political movement or as a way to develop software.
Personally, I think the anti-corporate dance is a childish waste of time. There’s absolutely no way that the open source development model can be successfully applied to the real economy. Why? Because it has no way of creating surplus wealth to sustain growth while replenishing the resources consumed on a day-to-day basis. Without the input of external resources — corporate money and unpaid developer time — it would collapse.
People can preach all they want about “sharing” (usually someone else’s property) and the “community”, but it has all been tried before by any number of utopian Don Quixotes. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. We are, after all, just like our forebearers.
People can preach all they want about “sharing” (usually someone else’s property) and the “community”, but it has all been tried before by any number of utopian Don Quixotes. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. We are, after all, just like our forebearers.
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Dude, it’s just software. We’re not talking about full blown communism.
“In a free market, everybody wins.”
Not true, and discredited for many years. In a free market, lots of people win. Not everybody.
“Without the input of external resources — corporate money and unpaid developer time — it would collapse”
Yes, it’s a model based on the use of work which is (often) uncompensated in monetary form. Why is that so hard to grasp? And as for ‘collapsing’ – well, it’s been getting along pretty well for twenty years or so now…corporate involvement or no.
The participants in the debate selected the following aspects of what they call “professionalism” :
a) The appearance : free software advocates would be more credible if they stopped dressing like bums (t-shirts, snickers, jeans, etc.). I have trouble with this requirement, considering the fact that on numerous occasions the CEOs of big corporations (Gates, Job, Ellison, …) have made public appeareances wearing casual outfits, to say the least. I’ve yet to hear IT managers say they wouldn’t buy Macs due to the way Steve Jobs looks during his keynote presentations.
b) The organization : Mozilla is taken as an example. It is said that it went nowhere for many years until the people involved decided to organize themselves. Therefore, most free software developers should do the same in order to succeed. The problem here is that this requirement has already been met by a lot of projects (Debian, Gentoo, Free/Net/OpenBSD, etc.). By the way, is it a sign of professionalism when customers keep wondering if Novell will dump Netware, if HP will get rid of VMS or if Sun will abandon the SPARC platform ?
c) The official endorsement : we’re told that it would be great for free software if it were massively deployed by governments, corporations and other big spenders. Well, this should not be blamed on the free software community. Case in point : the US military recently signed a lucrative contract (half a billion dollars worth) with Microsoft. Considering that IE is an integral part of Windows, one would have hoped that the US government would know better than paying for an OS containing a browser highly criticized by the Homeland Security.
As a side note, I’d like to point to the fact that the guys who debated this issue online behaved in a despicable way (using obscenities, profanities, …). They certainly aren’t qualified to talk about professionalism.
How can employment of Open Source developers and grand marketing schemes possibly be bad?
Hobbiest’s can never create a system that is entirely free, they simply wouldn’t have the time to give such a thing away. Everyone must pay bills, and earning that money will take away from their time working on open source.
You take the more active of the open source developers, and employ them to be more active, it simply can not be a bad thing.
If anyone disagrees here, you are simply a fool!
Yes, it is just a software development model. But lots of utopian anti-market folks want to apply that model more broadly.
And, it has survived this long precisely because people are willing to donate their time, expertise and labor. In other words, because developers provide the external resources that keep it afloat. That model isn’t sustainable as the basis of an economy.
From a purely business point of view this needs to be very profitable for Novell. The business world really wants to know; Is open source going to prove good for Novell?
If Novell were to fail horribly at this venture it will have a very negative impact on other corporations considering similar adventures with open source. Novell is more or less the testbed for others.
There is lot of people watching, and certainly an equal number wondering.
Only time will tell.
“…lots of utopian anti-market folks”
As opposed to all those utopian “free-market” folks.
As “In a free market, everybody wins”.
What piffle.
Alright, I’ll be more specific as I think you missed the point.
In the free market, *anyone* can win. Laissez Faire philosiphy and practice is by far the most successful economic structure ever conceived, like it or not.
But this was not my point and that is a heavy discussion for another place and time.
In the context of this particular article, everyone involved wins, both Novell and the OSS community (more specifically, the linux “community”).
“Hobbiest’s can never create a system that is entirely free”
go download Debian.
“Laissez Faire philosiphy and practice is by far the most successful economic structure ever conceived, like it or not.”
I’d love to know what you’re basing this on, as there isn’t a country in the world today with a laissez faire or true free market economy. Not one. The problem with a system in which everyone can win is that the greedy bastards want to win as much as possible, which leaves the weak with nothing. Thankfully, most societies have historically indicated that this is not a system under which they wish to live, which is the reason for the existence of socialised healthcare, pensions and social security. All of which exist in some form everywhere, generally with great popular support.
@enloop: erm, I’ve never come across *anyone* who suggests open source should somehow form a model of economic development. Of course it wouldn’t work; it’s nowhere near a complete model, for a start. I don’t know where you picked up the idea that anyone thought it was, though. Even Stallman doesn’t go that far; he simply believes all *software* should be free.
In the free market, *anyone* can win. Laissez Faire philosiphy and practice is by far the most successful economic structure ever conceived, like it or not.
successful? More than the 50% of the world population live with a dialy basis of < $1. I think it’s successful for the monopolies.
A system that kills millons “silently” (and not so silently like in Iraq) is successful only from the capitalist point of view.
Novell will act in the OSS world just like it is: a corporation trying to make money from it. Managed in the right way, OSS will do millons for the corporations because you doesn’t have to pay anything for the source code.
2 cents…
and yes, we’re talking about software. Don’t talk about “laissez faire” in abstract terms, because the reality is not abstract — it involves discussing in a political ground which is not the aim of this forum, anyway.
I simply laugh about the “laissez faire”… ask about “laissez faire” to the victims of US-corporations backed dictatorships.
Did I say “In a free market, everybody wins.”?
No. You are fabricating.
There are people who want to replace the market economy with an economy based on the open source model. I think that’s impossible. I also think any attempt to eliminate difference in wealth and advantage is utopian. We can increase the wealth of the poorest, but the relative gap between the poor and the rich will always exist. The world doesn’t work like the Debian project, you know.
Novell has already bitten the GNOME minimalistic bullet by putting an excellent SuSE KDE desktop to its grave (now don’t tell me this is not true for if you have tried the new NLD you can see that they’ve spent considerable energy tuning the GNOME version but lets KDE to fend for itself).
I have installed the NLD, and nope, it’s not all about Gnome. Quite frankly, for a supposedly corporate desktop both the Gnome and KDE desktops shipped aren’t good enough. I get the impression that Suse let the ex-Ximian people have their chocolate in terms of them promoting the NLD because they already know that this will fail – they already did a Suse Linux Desktop and it didn’t sell well at all.
However, for some strange reason, corporate america is pushing for a Microsoft-like bland desktop …. and I see Novell leading that pack.
Corporate America is not pushing anything because Linux on the deskop hasn’t got off the ground. Novell is not leading anything here, and I never cease to be amazed by people who are just not realistic about this.
“Corporate America is not pushing anything because Linux on the deskop hasn’t got off the ground. Novell is not leading anything here, and I never cease to be amazed by people who are just not realistic about this.”
You are correct Novell is currently not leading anything.
They may not even be poised to do so in the future.
Despite the hopes and dreams of the open source community, the future holds a lot of obstacles for Novell.
The youth of forums such as this shows thru on a regular basis. The opinions held by some of the older crowd here is scattered with images of a Novell who in the past behaved not a far cry from that of Microsoft.