Richard Seibt, formerly CEO of Suse Linux before its acquisition by Novell in 2003, has left Novell. This follows the recent resignations of other top executives Chris Stone, Alan Nugent, and Deb Bergavin. The major portion of Novell’s management came from Novell’s acquisitions of Cambridge Technology Partners, Ximian and Silverstream.
Leave the ship before it sinks..
I had been thinking of switching from Fedora to SuSe 9.3. Not any more. I don’t get a warm, fuzzy feeling when all the SuSe guys decide to up & leave.
Could the souring of cooperate cooperation with Open Source turned These top susers onto a fedora like project but based on Suse Linux? Since Novell started beating the Linux drums they favored GTK and gnome, Suse, always a KDE oriented Dist just doesn’t look to fit into this outlook. This could make for an interesting development the open source world.
They’ve got a couple of name kernel hackers (Love, Kroah-Hartman) and other miscellaneous fellows like de Icaza.
Dropping some PHBs might be more feature than bug…
I’ve been using SUSE since 8.0, if the management team that lead SuSE is taking off, might be time to do so myself. I have to admit that I liked having access to YUM in Fedora 3 when I played with it.
Since Novell started beating the Linux drums they favored GTK and gnome, Suse, always a KDE oriented Dist just doesn’t look to fit into this outlook.
They would be crazy to do that. Right now, the only source of their income in the Linux land comes from SuSE. And beside that, Novell has already said that their customers want KDE.
It’s not that dramatic. It was Mr Seibt’s task to prepare SuSE for being sold, he fulfilled his task and sold SuSE, and now his task is finished and he will find another one, and Novell will find another one for his position. It’s business as usual.
Since Novell started beating the Linux drums they favored GTK and gnome,
Have any facts to back this up or is it just an opinion? If anything, I’d say they’ve favored KDE more. After all, they’re releasing Suse, but not Ximian. And their Novell branded distro seems to be fairly DE neutral. Correct me if I’m wrong here… (No trolls PLEASE!!!)
i’de have to go with G.W. on this one, i don’t think there are going to be any huge philisophical changes in the Suse camp at Novell. At some point if that changes… drop Suse, but right now, i see no reason to worry, this stuff happens all the time with company buy outs… business as usual.
i haven’t used 9.3, but in 9.2, suse put an exceptional ammount of work into kde, and i was and still am very impressed with it
Dropping some PHBs might be more feature than bug…
More often then not, its the lack of good PHBs that sinks a technology company, not a lack of good hackers…
More often then not, its the lack of good PHBs that sinks a technology company, not a lack of good hackers…
Quite right. First and foremost, you need direction as a company and Novell, as usual, are a rudderless and directionless mess.
When you’ve got people like this leaving, it’s a bad sign.
I absolutely agree. Almost nothing has changed about SuSE since it was bought by Novell. In fact, Novell changed a lot and SuSE almost didn’t. It still offers what most customers want (KDE), it still offers what a minority of customers want, me included (GNOME), it still employs kernel hackers, KDE contributors and so on. OK, ISOs are now released a bit earlier but this doesn’t make a difference for business customers since these will either buy the support or use another distro anyway.
I have been using SuSE privately for quite a while now and cannot notice any major changes. Novell itself contributed patches to Kontact for better interoperability with classical Novell products because most customers prefer KDE and Kontact over GNOME and Evolution. That’s it – the acquisition of SuSE finally turned Novell into a linux company and SuSE remains SuSE.
a PHB (Pointy-Haired boss…old Dilbert reference) is not a PHB if they prove themselves competent. Good management can do as much for companies as just having a lot of brilliance in one place.
Especially if your brilliant people don’t get along or aren’t team players….but that’s another story.
–JM
Using 9.3 since last weekend. SUSE/Novell did a *VERY* good job (again) with this release. It is super polished, and looks very, very good. Personally I think they lead in the Linux field, so I think this management changes don’t say much…
HtB
Linux kernel is a heck of a kernel but lately companies are having problems to carry it a long way. redhat is in bed with
microsoft and who knows what kind of impact microsoft will have on redhat future business strategy, so this might slow redhat down. I thougt suse had a chance untill ill-novell bought them out now those same novell people are jumping ship. the other distros are ok but they are not enterprise level like redhat and suse currently are. so it might be between microsoft vs SUN in the long run.
“redhat is in bed with
microsoft and who knows what kind of impact microsoft will have on redhat future business strategy, so this might slow redhat down. ”
Red Hat and MS people talked and that implies they are in bed together?. do you even know what happened there?. no.?. why are you trolling?
I don’t know much about the others, but Chris Stone’s departure was completely amicable and in fact, it had been known (as far as I remember) that his stay at Novell was just temporary. He remains a friend of the company.
Not trolling, Just bringing up a possibllity that microsoft and redhat might crate a partnership or what else in the future and that might bring a negivtive impact on linux in the long run since microsoft is against open source and needs to protect their investors money.
Those guys can be easily replaced.
“Not trolling, Just bringing up a possibllity that microsoft and redhat might crate a partnership or what else in the future and that might bring a negivtive impact on linux in the long run since microsoft is against open source and needs to protect their investors money.”
and Red Hat which has doing open source business would simply go along with whatever MS proposes against open source?. funny.
time will tell what is microsoft motives and i hope redhat does not make a mistake like apple did with miocrosoft long time ago. many companies has fallen to microsoft wishes.
Maybe it has something to do with the munich business … as far s i know they lost that in favour of Debian. On the other side Suse in Nuremberg is becoming somewhat of a linux-center for europe. Probably he just wanted a new challenge or got offered a better position … who knows.
Well, from what I see, in regards to the corporate structure, SuSE currently is acting like a stand alone business – although owned by Novell, it hasn’t been properly integrated into the Novell business structure.
With the new products being developed, I would say that it is simpy a matter of time before the SuSE brand name is phased out in favour of the Novell branded Linux distribution; coupled that with the fact that YaST is a very moduler configuration tool, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a move later on to replace the front end with Mono/GTK-Sharp, and gradually sharp-a-lise various parts as they see fit.
In the long run, it will be interesting to see where KDE will fit into the larger business programme, and whether there is room for it once Novell has “convinced” its customers that GNOME/GTK/Mono is the future, along with their own line up of software – iFolder/Groupwise etc.
Now, as for the Mono movements – a great idea IMHO, BUT I still don’t feel easy about those patents Microsoft has; the fact is, Microsoft can promise until the cows come home, but it isn’t going to change anything until there is a contract or a license of some sort making the mono implementation all kosher.