Suse Linux Founder Exits Novell

csplinter writes write to tell us that SuSE Linux founder Hubert Mantel has resigned from Novell stating "Too late for me. I just decided to leave Suse/Novell. This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." Novell confirmed his resignation but had little else to say on the topic. From the article: "Mantel's departure also comes less than a week after Novell announced a major restructuring that would result in 600 layoffs. It's unclear if Mantel's resignation is related to the restructuring."

"Too Late"?

[adavies42 (746183)]

What is the "too late for me" in reference to? TFA give no clue.

Re:"Too Late"?

[ElGuapoGolf (600734)]

I'm not sure what the "too late" comment means, but I think he takes a shot at some of the ximian folks later on when he suggests a maintainer for the SuSE kernel could be found from somewhere in the Ximian group.

Ouch. I mean, given the bloated (but usable) mess that is Evolution, would you want those guys maintaining your distribution's kernel?

I think he's right, SuSE isn't the same company anymore. Kubuntu, here I come.

who is it unclear to?

[frovingslosh (582462)]

It's unclear if Mantel's resignation is related to the restructuring.

Who is it unclear to? And what are they smoking?

Especially...

[alamandrax (692121)]

When we took away his stapler. That just pissed him off.

My Bet

[Crimsane (815761)]

If I had to make a wager as to why he left, I would bet someone close to him got layed off and he put his own job on the line to defend them.

I was sad to hear suse layed of This dude [beaufour.dk] who was doing lots of xforms stuff for FF.

But of course Novell has been doing lots of good for a while now, all the time losing money, so I couldn't be too critcal.

Probably not a big deal

[Jherek Carnelian (831679)]

This departure is probably no big deal. Every single "amicable" corporation acquisition that I have ever seen worked out the same way. The founders of the acquired company stay on board in order to help assure a smooth merger. But after about a year or so, they almost always take off for new projects. I suspect that sticking around until now was a contractual obligation on his part as part of selling the company.

These guys tend to be of two types - "startup" guys who don't think it is fun to run an established business, or a "control types" who aren't satisifed unless they are running the whole show. Either way, when they sell the company, they are no longer in the position that most appeals to them so they move on as soon as they can.

So, I wouldn't take this event too seriously, he's probably had short-timer's disease for the last six months anyway.

Yet another Novell failure

[stryemer (34743)]

Someone should put a stop to Novell. SuSE may be the next in a long line of great products (Corel, WordPerfect, etc) that Novell flushes down the toilet. It's really too bad because from my experience with SuSE was better than RedHat and Windows. Hey Novell management, fire yourselves!

Restructure...

[by Anonymous Coward]

/ Sorry, SuSE's restructuring supposed   \
| that chamaleon got fired. Get used to  |
| me: the more efficient, featureful     |
\ allmighty and POSIX compliant Clippy!  /
        \     ____
         \   / __ \
          \  O|  |O|
             ||  | |
             ||  | |
             ||    |
              |___/

So why no KDE??

[questro (802656)]

Is this guy leaving because KDE is being dropped? I really like SuSE and have been using it for a while. KDE is a big part of that. I like the polish. Is there some license issue that's driving the KDE issue? What gives? I hate to go switching distros AGAIN! This is why I stopped using RedHat/Fedora.

Re:So why no KDE??

[cloudmaster (10662)]

I like the Polish too, but I'm not sure what they have to do with KDE in SuSE. Maybe if you were telling a lightbulb replacing joke it would be relevent that you like the Polish, but not here.

I'm gonna have to drive by the Weinerschnizel on the way home now, and get a Polish sandwich. Or maybe just some mini corn dogs. Yeah, I think I'll get mini corn dogs. I like the corn dogs *and* the Polish.

Not Unexpected. Next Stop Bankruptcy

[segedunum (883035)]

Well, some of us could have told him that as soon as Novell took over Suse. Novell has a terrible track record of making anything work.

The warning signs were there when Richard Seibt and a few others left some time ago, as well as other Novell employees who didn't even come from Suse like Alan Nugent. And despite the positive spin [eweek.com] some people in the company have tried to make of this for their own ends, there's no denying that a lot of people from different parts of the company have been layed off. Yes, even a lot of Gnome oriented people have gone, which means that Novell has no resources and people whatsoever to carry out all of those desktop plans some people say they're doing. They're going to need to spend even more money just to tread water and maintain everything. Looks like there's some truth to Kurt Pfeifle's article, and Mantel's swipe that they should be able to find someone talented to replace him as a kernel developer from Ximian is telling.

Novell may end up with no Gnome or KDE at all, or even worse, no Linux. People talk about KDE and Gnome a lot, but the fact is that Novell haven't even moved to Linux - that's where the real problems are. Open Enterprise Server is a bastardised Linux OS with Netware running on top of it. What customer wants that and what's the point?! No one judging from the people not buying it and going Red Hat instead. Unless this new COO really does understand his market, the technology and what's required we're seeing Novell go bust right here. Judging from this he's got the basic concepts of how to make people redundant badly wrong. Get that wrong, throw in the towel because it's not worth the effort. You need the right people on your side, not to alienate them.

The Conversations

[mpapet (761907)]

The guy probably heard a few of these lines before throwing in the towel.

1. Bring that point up at the next meeting.
2. Check with person X to okay Y.
3. Find out when person Z's subordinate has the time to do that task.
4. I know you preferred Option A but the company is doing Option B.
5. Fill out that form and give it to accounting and wait 30 days to get reimbursed.
7. The Board has decided to go a diffferent direction.
8. Let me run that by person A before doing anything.
9. Send me an email about it to remind me....

There's a bunch more probably much funnier too. Join in and add a few!

Re:The Conversations

[The Monster (227884)]

10. I think we need to establish a committee to deal with that.
11. Is this initiative compatible with our Mission Statement?
12. Can we proactively leverage vertical syergies to deliver five-nines reliability?
13. We need a subcommittee to work on that aspect of your plan.
14. Now that you've written all that code, we're changing the design specs on you.
15. ...again.
16. If there's such a thing as a sub-subcommittee, we'll be needing one of those.
17. We need a cross-departmental task force to get a wider perspective on things.
18. The task force needs to divide itself into committees along departmental lines.
19. We need to make everything top priority!
20. ???
21. PROFIT!

all I have to say is...

[DarkProphet (114727)]

So long and thanks for all the SuSE!

(Apologies to both NOFX and the late Douglas Adams)

Wish him well

[FishandChips (695645)]

Perhaps it isn't very important why Hubert Mantell has left SuSE, only that he has. Much more important is a big vote of thanks to someone whose dedication and hard work have done an immense amount for SuSE and most likely for anyone who uses Linux (at lot of them will have started out with SuSE). He helped found the company, after all. Here's wishing him all the very best in life and whatever he decides to do next. Sometime soon, Novell's loss will be our gain.

Re:13 years for what

[krgallagher (743575)]

"I love Suse. It's my favorite distro by far."

Same here. I really do not understand staements like "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." Of course it isn't. It is Novel. Novel is an old corporation with a well known corporate culture. Mantel knew that when he sold the company. If he had any illusions, he was just deluding himself. I think the most telling quote in the article is "I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly. After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division." Sounds to me like corporate infighting and Mantel lost.

Re:13 years for what

[by Anonymous Coward]

Yes, especially since kernel development is not exactly Ximians forte. This is probably a clash between company cultures. German engineers believe that quality matters while american managers know that playing golf with executives is more important.

Re:13 years for what

[ScriptedReplay (908196)]

Same here. I really do not understand staements like "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago." Of course it isn't. It is Novel.

This is SuSE's *founder* that you're talking about. Meaning he had a *vision* for his company which, from his quote, just isn't there anymore.

Sounds to me like corporate infighting and Mantel lost.

Of course it does - and that's probably what it is, too. The question is, however, *what did he lost to*? Now, if you look at the quote more closely, he's saying 'those smart guys from Ximian will pick up on kernel maintenance in no time' - which is of course untrue (at least the 'no time' part, although I suspect whoever will end up in his place will most likely *not* be coming from the desktop division) and to me it sounds like a veiled accusation that the Ximian guys pushed agendas in areas they had little clue about. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it does not sound that implausible in the light of recent evolutions at Novell that 'loud' was preferred to 'clueful'

Re:13 years for what

[Zemran (3101)]

It was probably 'those smart guys at Ximian' that advised Novell to drop KDE. Many users, me amongst them, who have stayed with SuSE for years will now look elsewhere and I should think that Mantel is aware of this since he was there when the last 'should we drop KDE' debate was held and it was decided that it was best to keep KDE as a lot of users prefer it.

Re:13 years for what

[Reducer2001 (197985)]

Perhaps you meant to say that administrators who have Novell solutions in place don't have anything to do? My company has NetWare servers for file/print/auth/e-mail/Internet proxy/etc. in place. Our servers have uptimes in the 100's of days (our best record was 438 days until the mobo died) and require almost no upkeep. Not to mention that I don't have to worry too much about nasty viruses coming in. Oh, and our NetWare servers have a bash prompt that I can use, as well as running several OSS programs (Apache, PHP, MySQL).

Re:13 years for what

[Amouth (879122)]

oh i have seen plenty of good set up netware servers.. my personal favorite is

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_no vell_server_discovered_after/ [theregister.co.uk]

(a friend of mine was an admin up there when it happened.)

on the other hand.. i have seen horridly setup stuff.. and the client computers always having issues.. my favorite is watching network packets and seeing printer discovery packets from a school network in greensboro in a school network in wilmington..

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[civilizedINTENSITY (45686)]

The comment about finding a kernel maintainer was likewise interesting:

"I have been the maintainer of the Suse kernel for more than a decade now," Mantel wrote. "I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly. After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division."

It is enough to make one wonder if there is a power struggle, or at least the perception of one, arising from differences of opinion between the SuSE and Ximian groups. SuSE's technical excellence is perhaps not so appreciated as some feel it should be? How important is mono?

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Arandir (19206)]

To me, that sounds like subtle (or not so subtle) sarcasm. Perhaps Mantel heard the phrase "lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division" used one too many times as an excuse by his bosses, that he simply used it back at them.

After all, if you have a division of perfect people down the hall, why not let them work on the kernel? Even if they're applications people with absolutely no kernel experience, how hard can it be for perfect people who have all the answers?

Seems like flamebait and troll, but maybe not...

[porkThreeWays (895269)]

Since Novell has taken over, they've open sourced a lot of suse. Yast is now open source. The basic suse linux distribution is now freely available immediatly (there used to be a wait time and ftp only installs). Maybe there have been massive internal changes that aren't aparent to the public, but it seems to me they've become more open lately. The quality of Suse offerings have become better as well. I tried suse a few years ago and wasn't terribly impressed. Lately however, I've been inclined to use it on my desktop and some servers.

Re:Sour Grapes

[WindBourne (631190)]

Or he is bright enough to realize that competing head on with redhat and indirectly with Sun is a mistake?

At this point, how is Suse different from Redhat? I recently switched to Suse (from Mandrake due to their lousy QC). At the last job, I was coding on Redhat. I was loving Suse until the gnome/kde announcement. At this point, I am telling ppl if they want a Gnome distro to do redhat, and am back to looking for a good kde distro.