Novell is an interesting company, and has only become more so since it decided to dive head first into GNU/Linux last year. Nat Friedman, formerly of Novell acquired Ximian and now the veep of Novell’s Linux Technologies Group took some time to answer OfB.biz’s questions about exactly where the company is heading with GNU/Linux.
Friedman on Novell’s Linux Strategy
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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To [quickly] make SuSE really resonate with the community, they should at least offer some free version of SuSE like Mandrake does. Once the community is “hooked”, more developers will develop software for SuSE. This can only be good for all involved. In the present situation, some SuSE rpms are very hard to find. Case in point, PythonCard. Remember that MS became popular because “everyone” was using it. My CAD 0.02.
Cb..
Charles,
SuSE has always offered a free version that can be installed via FTP from their website portals. Most users try the LiveCD (demo) first before deciding to either install the basic free version or go all out by paying for the retail package that includes support among other things. The advantage of trying the LiveCD first is you can check if SuSE auto-detects all your system hardware with out the need to install to the hard drive. I found SuSE to be a better Linux distro than anything out there for not only ease of use but tools such as SuSE Plugger (auto plug & play detection), YaST, YOU, SuSE Watcher, Firewall2, etc.
They open sourced YaST and Ximian Connector, which they didn’t have to do. They already offer a free FTP style install like the OpenBSD folks do. I like the way they are doing things, they are contributing a ton of resources to the community. I am excited about the future of Novell with regards to Linux.
Great FUD.
Novell knows that if you are going to reap the rewards of working with the open source community (collaboration, volunteer development, etc.), you MUST play ball with the open source community (“GPL Things”). Redhat realized this long ago as well. Sun hasn’t figured this part out yet, they are the ones in big trouble, wheras there is a lot of excitement surrounding Novell. There _is_ a lot of uncertainty, but Novell is not going to sink because they GPL’ed components. Their fate will be decided by their execution.
In summary, the rules of the technology world are changing, get over it.
To quote Slashdot:
Step 1) Buy open source companies
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Profit!!!
Why did Novell buy Ximian or SuSE?. There was nothing these companies developed that wasn’t available for free.
You want brownie points in the community, hell they could have open sourced some old stuff like the UNIX patents they own from AT & T.
And what’s with the pandering to the open source community?. They say “gimme” and all of a sudden companies are paralysed with fear. How come Open Office still can’t beat MS Office?. or Gimp still can’t beat Photoshop? or Ardor is no match for Protools? or MySQL is no match for Oracle?
“And what’s with the pandering to the open source community?. They say “gimme” and all of a sudden companies are paralysed with fear. How come Open Office still can’t beat MS Office?. or Gimp still can’t beat Photoshop? or Ardor is no match for Protools? or MySQL is no match for Oracle?”
Can Open Office replace MS Office in many cases? Yes.
Can Gimp replace Photoshop in many cases? Yes.
Etc etc…
If one application is better than another and is not open source then use it by all means if you need/have to.
It takes time to develop software and changes don’t happen overnight plus in some instances it is difficult to implement some functionalities because of patent issues.
You can see through Nat’s reasoning. The guy wants to say something nice about KDE, but he just cannot help himself, so he gives us this bullshit that customers do not care about desktop environments. Nonsense
People going to Linux have a Linux-geek in house who is initiating the migration and who is knowledgeable. If you think you are going to ram Gnome down their throats and they are going to thank for it, you are sadly mistaken. This is the biggest strategic mistake that Novell is making. They are betting on Gnome for the enterprise when Gnome remains to anyone who cares to look a much inferior environment. It is less tested and crashes more than I have ever seen KDE do.
> Can Open Office replace MS Office in many cases? Yes.
Why aren’t IBM or HP shipping Windows PCs loaded with OO.org?
> Can Gimp replace Photoshop in many cases? Yes.
Only for some cash strapped college kid. If you’re a graphics pro you don’t mess with Gimp.
> It takes time to develop software and changes don’t happen
> overnight plus in some instances it is difficult to
> implement some functionalities because of patent issues.
Gimp has been around since 1997 – that’s 7 years – and in 7 years it’s still hasn’t come close to ease of use of even JASC Photopaint. If there are patent issues, tell companies like Redhat or SuSE to pay and license the patent – stop being cheap. That’s the problem with Open Source – you have no way of paying for patent licensing. If there’s a patent on something, every industry in the world has a way of paying for it and passing the cost to the consumer – except the open source world – because you guys have dug yourselves into a hole because the expectation is that its all free.
“If there are patent issues, tell companies like Redhat or SuSE to pay and license the patent – stop being cheap. That’s the problem with Open Source – you have no way of paying for patent licensing.”
That’s what’s wrong with opensource – all those pesky patents!!
titled:
Re: Woollhara (IP: —.cable.ubr03.mort.blueyonder.co.uk)
>SuSE has always offered a free version that can be installed >via FTP from their website portals.
That much is well known. Now just tell me. With all the distros arround, how many people are going to do an FTP install/or download a live CD just to try out SuSE. One of the best ingredients of success is the mindset a compnany product projects to the consuming public.
I believe that you will agree with me that if SuSE provided ISOs, a great many people would have chance to try it. This is fact. Remember too that most of the world does not have broadband, so FTP installs are a burden to these people. Live CDs to these are just another pain especially if one factors in the fact that other distros can be downloaded easily. The ISO’s do not have to be complete. SuSE has always been as easy to use/configure or even better than Mandrake, but according to DistroWatch.com, it is not all that popular. Why? One of the reasons IS because not so many people get to try it.
Let’s remember one thing too. Success is about the mindset, what people think about a product and of course marketing and much less about a good product per se.
“One of the best ingredients of success is the mindset a compnany product projects to the consuming public.”
>>>>>>>>>
But I think in this context we should define “consuming” as “paying”, economical success is profit. And SuSE was not bad in this regard. Offering 0$ ISOs didn’t help Mandrake, why should it help SuSE? I think Novel is not stupid to first concentrate on the big corporate market and ISV.
Linux geeks inititating a migrations is not where Novell is aiming at. It is aiming at an executive who wants to make a 2000000$ investment in either Win or Lin. Just as netware is usually not running on some home-lan. It’s corporate business Novell is in, not home users.
Here different tactics apply. So then open office becomes a serious alternative, since the executive has 45 workers, who only type invoices or whatever. That’s also where the Red Carpet comes around: these 45 workers’ desktops need to be remotely controlled, either ZEN works for Win or Red carpet for Lin. So whatever you do, Novell’s your man, now and in the future, just not for watching DVD’s on your themed desktop.
> Why aren’t IBM or HP shipping Windows PCs loaded with OO.org?
They could do it. I guess in a windows environment MS Office is so entrenchend that it’s difficult to see anything else.
>> Can Gimp replace Photoshop in many cases? Yes.
>Only for some cash strapped college kid. If you’re a >graphics pro you don’t mess with Gimp.
Well, now this is silly. We use Gimp for the few graphics tasks we have where I work with great success. Again for what we need to do it’s more than enough, I could say it’s too powerful. We’re not college kids either
Most of the software patents are ridiculous, I agree there might be some that could be legitimate but for the majority it’s a waste of money, time, stiffle innovation and makes lawyers richer. The patents system is in need of a good overhaul except nobody has the balls to do it because you’re going against the big corporations who can afford to patent anything and use that as an economic weapon against smaller companies.
Why did Novell buy Ximian or SuSE?. There was nothing these companies developed that wasn’t available for free.
It only makes sense to me that Novell would integrate already working open source organizations into their own instead of trying to create a linux offering from stratch. It’s a matter of time. Novell can get right on moving forward now rather than spending the next three years trying to catch up to where Suse, for instance, is in 2004.
I currently cannot find a Fedora FTP install image, this is my sole reason for not using Fedora right now. I refuse to use discs for this purpose… The install process is EXACTLY the same as using a CD, except I don’t have to keep swaping out discs, I don’t have to worry about whether the images were burned correctly etc…
Why anyone wouldn’t rather do an FTP install is mind boggling to me…
Totally, if you have broadband whats the big deal? I hate swapping damn cds all the time. You would have to spend the time downloading the ISOs anyway, so why not just do the ftp install. Its the same way Gentoo works as well. It works great and you only get what you need.
What I do/did is download CD1 image for fedora (i miss the floppy image for sure) and boot off that and then press F2 and do linux askmethod. You can then do a install via http/ftp etc etc
This can be found easily on SuSE’s site but I just did a Google and found another link for the SuSE 9.1 LiveCD ISO here ( http://www.distrowatch.com/?newsid=01541#0 ). There’s also a SuSE FAQ page that may interest you here http://www.suse.com/en/private/products/suse_linux/prof/faqs/index….
“> Can Open Office replace MS Office in many cases? Yes.
Why aren’t IBM or HP shipping Windows PCs loaded with OO.org?”
Check again. Both IBM and HP offer workstations and servers with Linux installed as an alternative to Windows. IBM for example offers the choice of RedHat or SuSE Linux which both come with programs that can be installed/uninstalled at the end user’s request. Linux distros such as SuSE Linux offer choice unlike Windows were everything seems to be forced on the customer.
“> Can Gimp replace Photoshop in many cases? Yes.
Only for some cash strapped college kid. If you’re a graphics pro you don’t mess with Gimp.”
There are differant versions over the years and if you had seriously used it would realize it’s not some basic tool for a strapped college student. Not everyone using a paint program is a graphic designer. Some are artists use the tools provided in programs such as Gimp to further compliment other software. I’ve worked for 2 years in animation and find both Gimp and Cinepaint ( http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/ ) to suit my needs. It’s also less costly than Photoshop. Cinepaint also can’t be so bad if companies such as film and animation studios use it on a daily basis. See link above for a list of studios currently using Cinepaint (formally Film Gimp).
I currently cannot find a Fedora FTP install image, this is my sole reason for not using Fedora right now.
Did this last week (and RH 8.0 the year before). Now, choose a Fedora mirror. I’m using
ftp://ftp.dc.aleron.net
Next, download and burn the installer bootable cd image (this is ~5 MB, so its too big to fit on a floopy, like the old bootnet.img files). This is located:
ftp://ftp.dc.aleron.net/pub/linux/fedora/linux/core/2/i386/os/imag…
Take note: Fedora install directory is
/pub/linux/fedora/linux/core/2/i386/os/
Now, reboot your computer with the boot cd. The installation will proceed as normal with the added step that you must choose an “FTP install” and provide the mirror URL and directory for the installation.
The install took me 30 minutes to set everything and then about 3.5 hours to download and install packages. I went to bed and let it work while I slept.
Why did Novell buy Ximian or SuSE?. There was nothing these companies developed that wasn’t available for free.
It’s true that most SuSE and Ximian products were GPL’d anyway, but what about YaST, RedCarpet, and Ximian-Connector? Also, it’s pretty obvious that what Novell really wants is experienced development teams, which is what they are getting by buying SuSE and Ximian.
I’ve thought about it before- If I had millions of dollars, it’d be paying to have some of the best Linux developers in the same room so some standards can be agreed upon and some wrinkles can be ironed out. Not that this doesn’t happen anyway, but it’s a little different if someone buys the company you work for or hires you and says, “You will solve these problems and you will work with these other people. If you can’t settle your own disagreements, I’ll settle them for you.”
As far as how Novell plans to be making money, it’s pretty clear Novell is hoping to be setting the standards under which Linux operates in the workplace. Once they are in that position, it leaves them as the obvious company to pay for initial setup and configuration, support, and services. Plus, any other non-free software they offer will be presumed to work well with a reputable Linux distro- their own. People running SuSE servers will pay for Novell e-mail software (or whatever non-free software they’ll offer) for the same reasons people buy Exchange for Windows servers: name recognition and perceived compatibility.