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.)

Still waters

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

run deep. Can't wait to what Novell does after they've gathered all of this knowledge and all of these developers to their helm.
Maybe offer an Open Source replacement for Active Directory?

Interesting

[SisyphusShrugged]

By making these moves they seem to be positioning themselves to be in a similar position to IBM, at least as someone at the forefront of Linux development and usage.

This is an intelligent move as it allows them to move into an area (one of the few in the computing industry) not yet monopolised by Micro$oft!

Am I the only one who trusts Novell?

[oldosadmin]

I don't know about you, but Novell is probably the only company I'd trust with this large a slice of the linux pie. They got royally screwed over by Microsoft (market share wise), and I'm sure more than one exec up there has thought about dethroning Gates.

Plus, they bought one of the best implementations of Gnome and a great KDE implementation. I can see Novell bringing the linux desktop together in many ways.

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

its win win win

[buddha42]

Novel really has so much potential here and so much to offer I really can't wait for them to get moving.

How about a cross platform groupwise based mail/groupware platform that can honestly compete with exchange?

Or a active directory competitor based on NDS.

Or a well respected certificate program.

Best of all, a genuine compeitor to redhat, forcing some price and service competition.

Between Novel, RedHat, and IBM the next few years are going to be amazing for linux. It would be nice if Sun would stop pussyfooting around, but they've got some issues to work out first.

Re:Am I the only one who trusts Novell?

[Anonymous Coward]

You trust them because they want to dethrone MS? That's pretty stupid if you ask me. There's a lot of companies out there that would love to dethrone Gates and Co. That doesn't mean that if/when that day comes businessmen worldwide will be running into the streets chanting open source. As bad as MS is, I'm convinced that Oracle would be far worse, and while IBM has a good name in the Open Source community now, I'm not convinced they'd handle that type of power again any better than they did the first time around. Novell wants what every business wants, money and influence. That doesn't make them evil but it does mean we need to keep a close eye on them.

Re:Am I the only one who trusts Novell?

[Erratio]

I don't see dethroning Gates as a motive which would inspire one to stick to the open source mentality. Collectively among the Linux, etc. community it's a good goal, but if that were a driving force behind a company then there would be definitely interest in maintaining an amount of power which conflicts with the communal aspect. The main motivation has to be something more along the lines of wanting the best software and realizing (or thinking) that open source is the way for that.

Novell may be a good company for this because it seems as though they have a lot more to gain than their likely perceived losses, considering their current small foundation in these industries.

Re:Still waters

[cbreaker]

"The real problem with AD is it is a horrible crossbread between a directory and their old domain system"

Not only that, but the fact that AD is filled with nonsense.. much like the Windows Registry. Why couldn't they have made something that was more refined, slick, and easier to manage? They had every opportunity and they blew it big time.

Oh well, that's Microsoft for ya.

We are just being careful

[bogie]

" I don't know about you, but Novell is probably the only company I'd trust with this large a slice of the linux pie. "

Why on earth would you just trust Novell automatically? Novell's cash cow has always been its proprietary technology. They are a proprietary company that although by no mean about to die has already seen its heyday. The adoption of Linux by Novell was a long term strategic move based on the fact that Novell wasn't going anywhere with its traditional technologies, and needed to buy someone else's to compete in today's marketplace.

I see no reason to be anything but cautiously optimistic. Anything beyond that is just foolish. Its going to take years not months before Novell can be regarded as a true ally to Linux and Open Source. Just because they are continuing down the path that Ximian and Suse were already on doesn't prove anything.

If they really want to befriend the Open Source community they could start by opening up YAST and the Ximian connector. That would be a real token of faith. Again, acquiring an Open Source company or two and then just keeping the status quo doesn't mean much.

"Plus, they bought one of the best implementations of Gnome and a great KDE implementation. I can see Novell bringing the linux desktop together in many ways."

Perhaps. Or maybe they take Gnome and KDE and make the best proprietary Linux desktop ever made. Or maybe you'll see the semi-proprietary Suse with the even more proprietary NDS and Groupwise technologies get rolled into a really slick server? But how would that help Open Source?

Honestly I haven't read anything that makes alarms go off in my head thinking Novell is trying to screw over "Linux". I also haven't read anything mind blowing with regards to Novell opening up anything that wasn't open before.

If Novell just acts as a steward for Ximian and ensures it has funding so that they can continue to kick back to Gnome I'll be happy. If they make Suse even more proprietary its not the biggest loss. But really let's hope Novell opens some of its own code and sponsors some new OSS projects that will take Linux and OSS to the next level.

Re:Embracing Open Source

[Coryoth]

Well, let's just hope they ARE interested in Open Source, instead of trying to write all these non-gpl applications that only work right on their distribution.

That's still to be seen isn't it. It's all very well to talk the talk (which they've been doing a good job of so far), the reall question will be how well they follow through with it.

My personal guess is that Novell will remain fairly proprietary - There's too much invested in ZenWorks and the like to just open source it all now (from a politcla, justify to your uneducated shareholders viewpoint) - But I do think they'll produce a fairly clean distribution, and at the least have fairly distribution agnostic proprietary parts.

Only time will tell though.

Welcome to FOSS Novell!

[rjamestaylor]

But if Chris Stone says anything about "Monetizing Linux" or Open Source, please stand up and walk out. That's what should have happened to Darl Gates, er, McBride when he said he was going to turn Caldera/SCOGrope into "bottled water" sellers.

Novell is a Good Guy right now but Can'O'Pee and SCOGrope come from Novell...albeit an earlier incarnation with Noorda.

Companies, especially publicly traded ones, have loyalties to stockholders and are subject to spot-on 180's in pursuit of increasing stockholder value.

So, no offense, Novell and Chris, but I think you understand why we might be liking to keep things platonic right now.

Keep it up, Novell. You're winning many new friends.

Desparate Measures from a Dying Company

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else see this as essentially an admission of defeat? A panicked, last ditch attempt to find some avenue for revenue/sales growth given that Novell has basically no customers other than legacy customers, for whom the pain of migrating to a better enterprise networking architecture exceeds the pain of inertia? How exactly -Chris Stone's eloquent yet content-free market-speak aside- does Novell intend to create a business around this open source architecture? What VALUE is Novell adding? What's the Special Sauce?

My favorite quote from the interview: "We're not after Microsoft. We're after opportunity." As the CarTalk boys say, "Good Luck"...

Revenue will be their biggest challenge

[Twid]

For Novell, I think the biggest challenge is to keep revenue stable while customers transition from NetWare to Linux, without losing too many customers to Windows in the process.

NetWare is still pretty expensive on the server. A 50-user copy is about $150 a seat on CDW retail ($7,500), about $50 a seat under a licensing agreement ($2,500).

SuSE is $999 per server with no client licenses fees.

Figuring NetWare to be about 50% of Novell's one billion in revenue, that means Novell would stand to lose more that 25% of their total revenue assuming everyone switched to SuSE. Novell might make this up with SuSE/Ximian desktop revenue, but I see large amounts of revenue from Linux on the desktop as being a long time in the making.

The estimates for SuSE revenue for 2003 were for about $40 million in revenue. As near as I can tell Ximan never really made any money to speak of.

So, if I haven't bored anyone to death yet, Novell NetWare is a $500 million revenue stream, SuSE is a $40 million revenue stream. Novell needs to very carefully transition from NetWare to SuSE if they want to keep revenue even. They can also grow by taking customers from Microsoft or Red Hat. But, it appears to me that Novell will have to shrink about 25% in size in order to remain profitable in the short term. Red Hat, with a more mature Linux strategy, only made $100 million in the last four quarters.

None of this is a bad thing, and I wish Novell the best of luck. I used to work there, and I still have friends there. Just doing the math though it seems like they will need to get smaller before they get bigger again.

IBM open sourced AFS

[mdfst13]

IBM open sourced AFS, so there is some precedent. Of course, AFS's reliance on root servers (to integrate the different AFS cells; what allows cmu.edu to cd into mit.edu or pitt.edu) make it a stronger commercial open source candidate (i.e. potential revenue is more from leasing root server access than selling client or normal server licenses anyway). Still, anything that centralizes file serving can lead to support contracts, etc. that can justify open source development.

Open sourcing would also allow integration of open source tools like MySQL or ReiserFS.

SWAG: Maybe Novell wants to buy MySQL?

[PB8]

It's a very wild guess, but think about it. Novell already has the Ximian desktop and now SuSE. Next, try to get a key piece of the LAMP server , and what's more central to most current web content packages than MySQL?

Re:Still waters

[Jellybob]

This is going to be completely useless (I can't claim to have much experience with LDAP, having given up setting it up every now and then), but I did see a program that does just that - provide a pretty frontend for OpenLDAP directories, and I know Red Hat/FC1 have the option of selecting LDAP as an authentication method during setup.

Re:Still waters

[passthecrackpipe]

Well, now that you reminded me ;-) SUSE do have some very cool directory/user management stuff against OpenLDAP - SuSE Linux Standard Server and SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server have a very nice management environment, that uses Samba, OpenLDAP, and all the other usual suspects and slap a pretty sane management frontend against it. it will do Windows Domains, so your windows users should be happy, and will also do Linux users. there are still some issues with using the same credentials against linux as well as windows, and some other minor details, but on the whole it works pretty well......

Re:More information.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I mean he was modded as informative and you've been modded as troll. Who am I supposed to believe here?

What would be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is if Novell could bring in some of the guys from Boston(Ximian) and Germany(Suse) for say a weeklong brainstorming session in Utah. Now, I don't know if Novell even really has a desktop strategy and they might be happy doing some directory services stuff on Linux as well as other server stuff, but it wouldn't hurt.

There's not going to be some Knome like someone else hypothesized about, but what we could see are some ideas about how Gnome and KDE can play nicely together. To me, KDE has always been about the technology and a integrated desktop, and Gnome has been about the killer apps and a slim UI.

If it's possible I would like to see some Gnome apps start using some KDE technology like maybe KParts, DCOP, whatever. I don't know if that's even possible. I mean, what's up with Bonobo? Is anybody using it anymore. It wouldn't be bad to maybe get some QT/KDE bindings for Mono. But I don't know if Novell wants to tread into those waters with the licensing issues surrounding QT. At the very least, Novell could help out with freedesktop.org to get some standardization going on.

Personally, I don't see Linux on the desktop ever getting mainstream until there is more cooperation between the two DEs. I'm not even talking about some kind of integration of the two, but at least some basic component-level communications. Is it completely unfeasible for some Bonobo component to act as a Kpart and maybe vice-versa. There needs to be a standard for bookmarks and such.