Novell's Chris Stone at the MySQL Users Conference

An anonymous reader writes "According to the MySQL User's Conference page, Chris Stone of Novell, the guy behind Open Source at Novell who was responsible for the purchase of SUSE and Ximian, will be speaking at the MySQL conference. Perhaps we finally get to see what Novell is planning to do with Linux?" (That conference is taking place in mid-April, in Orlando.)

Re:Still waters

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe offer an Open Source replacement for Active Directory?

I wouldn't hold your breath. Novell is a proprietary company. Notice they didn't purchase Red Hat an open source company, who has adhered strictly to the open source philosophy e.g. not even including mp3 capability with XMMS. Novell purchased Suse, who still keeps Yast nice and proprietary. I see two proprietary companies taking what they can, but to some extent not wanting to share completely with the other children.

Re:Am I the only one who trusts Novell?

[bsharitt]

Anyone wanna bet we'll be seeing a Knome 4.0 release rather than a Gnome 4.0 and KDE 4.0?


I was hoping for GDE 4.0

Re:Still waters

[cbreaker]

Why take things so litteraly? I think he means "an alternative to AD" since most people don't use Netware anymore.

I think NDS is pretty good. As simple or complex as you need it to be. (AD on the other hand is complicated from the start.)

Re:Still waters

[DShard]

NDS has been deprecated for years. E-Directory is the Novell directory now. E-directory uses a DB made by (I think) Brigham young uni for Genealogy research. You are right about MS was _way_ after novells entrance into the market. The real problem with AD is it is a horrible crossbread between a directory and their old domain system and that it isn't particularly standards conforment (surprise!)

IDONOTAGREEWITHTHISPOST

[cbreaker]

Show me the proof?

How come everytime a company that's not "on top" goes and tries to expand their market, you get fools like this that say ignorant things like "this is a last ditch effort?"

Bah. I consider Novell a good asset to have behind Linux, they still have a lot of capital and talent in the company. I hope they use it wisely.

Re:Am I the only one who trusts Novell?

[JanneM]

Anyone wanna bet we'll be seeing a Knome 4.0 release rather than a Gnome 4.0 and KDE 4.0?

Won't happen. Many of the basic differences between the projects aren't one of degrees, where you can find a middle ground. For toolkit, for example, you would need to choose between GTK and Qt - there is no average or middle ground there. Had either been significantly better than the other, it would have been easier, but, flame wars aside, both are mature, complete toolkits.

And whichever way you choose, you loose most - if not all - of the people who enjoy working with the other toolkit, leaving the community just as split as before. In fact, you end up worse, due to buildup of hard feelings and bruised egos from the unifying attempt.

No, the right way is through freedesktop.org - define standards that any desktop should adhere to and infrastructure technologies they should support, and let people go wild with their projects. Sort of like defining an open document format rather than standardizing on one, and only one, word processor.

Re:NDS/eDirectory on Linux

[hendersj]

Actually, with the eDirectory Redistribution Kit, you can get 250,000 user licenses for free for any of the supported platforms. (This is the offer you were referring to, and yes, the RDK is still available)

eDirectory is plumbing, and Novell understands that - the value of eDirectory comes by having:

1. Wide adoption of it as the core of identity management solutions, and

2. Services that effectively leverage eDirectory to provide the value.

Selling eDirectory doesn't make a lot of sense, but providing the services to help (a) implement it effectively, (b) support it effectively, and (c) understand how to implement services that utilize the identity store effectively is where revenue can be generated.

Re:Still waters

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenLDAP is a great project, don't get me wrong - however, eDirectory is much, much more scalable than OpenLDAP.

NDS and eDirectory are not just LDAP servers - in fact, NDS provided no LDAP capabilities (there was a bolt-on NLM on NetWare to provide LDAPv2 access to it at one point). eDirectory provides a fully-compliant LDAPv3 interface. But to say that eDirectory is just an LDAP server is like saying that a Porsche is just a car.

eDirectory provides many additional interfaces, including SOAP, XML, ADSI, NDAP (Novell's DAP), and many others.

Re:Still waters

[passthecrackpipe]

It is my experience that when people say "I want a directory for my infrstructure" (especially management), they really mean to say "i want a nice, easy, flexible and most of all pretty way of managing users for my systems. OpenLDAP, for all its nice features lacks in most cases the out of the box functionality (it is there, but you have to do a lot of work to make it happen for you) that most people would want. It lacks in most distros the default schemas all set up and ready to go for system authentication. It lacks the nice gui that will do this management in a comprehensive and consistent manner, with rule checking and semantics checking etc.Now, I'm not flaming OpenLDAP, as it is a robust and solid piece of directory work that is simply love to hate, however don't confuse the backend and engine with an "enterprise level solution".

Re:SWAG: Maybe Novell wants to buy MySQL?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Wouldn't SAP have something to say about that? I think they went into partnership with MySQL a while back.

Re:Still waters

[ahillen]

Novell purchased Suse, who still keeps Yast nice and proprietary.

1. YAST might be proprietary, but it comes with the source and you can share it as long as you don't charge for it (and you can modify it and share the modifications)... I just say that because many people seem to think that YAST is a traditional closed-source only-available-for-money-from-SuSE type of application.

2. SuSE keeps a somewhat stricter control (which boils down to: only SuSE is allowed to SELL it, others can only distribute it free of charge) on their setup program for their distribution, since this is the part the are able to differentiate from the other distributions. Apart from that they contribute a lot to different open source projects (Linux kernel, Xfree,KDE...), so calling them a proprietary company is a bit... strange.

3. I think the reason for Novell buying SuSE is more based on opportunities (what company is available to buy) and the technical merit of SuSE. I don't think an evil, proprietary company bought a like-minded other (which seems to be the spin you want to give it).