Re: Novell buys Ximian

[bob@evilkat.com]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 06:41:40AM -0700, Robert Threet wrote:
> All true.  I just think at this point, Novell is the kiss-of-death for the many technologies they
> buy up.  (Don't forget DR-DOS).  It's sad.  Their Zenworks (App Launcher) would make a lot of
> people lives a lot easier if people would just consider them.  I still have meetings where the
> need for this technology is discussed but when they find out it actually exists and it's a Novell
> product the issues are dropped.  Having good or even excellent ideas doesn't seem to help Novell
> at this point.  
> 

novell has been the kiss of death because they themselves have been competing
with windows and yet still needed windows (kind of an odd relationship),
haveing great ideas and trying to implement them on the windows platform will
not help them (and it hasn't in the past), Dr-Dos was a good product it was
just way to late in the game (gui vs cli user desktop) to try and get back
the windows/os2 user base and bring them back to cli, for the longest time
i thought it was very sad that novell just "didn't get it", thier main
competitor (MS) was the one devoloping the client portion of thier product,
that was the real kiss of death for all thier great ideas, now i think they
get the concept that linux isn't owned by anyone and so there is no direct
competition, in other words if you like linux and you like the nice features
we bring to the table great give us some money and everyone can be happy


> And yeah, the "weird idea to stop developement of gnome" has crossed my mind.  I'm not saying I
> buy it.  It is strange, though.  "Why buy a cow when milk's free"?  Novell seems to be saying
> "Here's some free milk.  If you do buy a cow - buy ours."  Linux is undercutting their product
> line too.  Firewalls and Squid Proxy eliminate the need for Bordermanager (for the most part). 
> SAMBA eliminates the need to buy print and file share.  OpenLDAP...  Portals...  The Novell angle
> is a strange one.

I think you've hit the nail on the head or really close, they aren't providing
the cow (thats linus and gnu that have the cow to give away), they have a 
pasturizing machine and for a small fee they will process and pasturize your
milk to make it taste better and last longer (it's an analogy :), this is
key to the success of thier linux idea, it's the exact same idea that ximian
had, ok so you use linux and you can download evolution but you want some 
support and neat features (like connecting with exchange) then pay us a little
and here you go, novell brings some really nice things to the table, you can
use samba or any number of other file sharing server processes but your still 
stuck with the unix rights system (anyone that has worked with novell
probably misses the granularity of control they had on the file level coming
to unix, i know i do), NDS is IMHO hands down the best implementation of an
ldap/x.500 directory i've ever seen, i would love to have my single sign on
with sessions so i don't have to log in over and over again, and if you can
make squid and iptables so that it works like bordermanager please tell me
how (i'm of course refering to the user logging in at some machine and squid
just knowing it's that user so it knows which areas of the internet they are
allowed, not by machine and not by making the user re-login to the proxy), and
yes i've heard of people duck taping and super glueing things together to come
up with a single sign on but as soon as the new versions of ldap and other 
pieces come down the pipe all the sudden your ripping apart this kludge to
get it working again, right now there is no easy answer for these things but
if by chance novell does things right there is no doubt in my mind that linux
could sweep large corporate installations with the ease of administration even
a MCSE admin could appreciate, this is a dream come true for me but if it's
not handled right it could turn into a nightmare :(  

only time will tell now

Bob T. Kat


-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.