YaST to Become Open Source 478
Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.
Good work Novell (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good work Novell (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope they can bring the famed Novell ease-of-use to Linux.
restarting yast development (Score:3, Insightful)
Yast makes me happy (Score:4, Insightful)
Ability to Adapt (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly Novell is taking the hint. They're aware of the fact that the world is going Open Source, and they're willing to deal with it. If they ensure a good relationship with the open source community now, they'll be rewarded with success for years to come. If they distance themselves from the open source community, like SCO, then they will make more money in the short term but be ousted in the long term.
Novell is a good organization that has been around since the beginning (or, at least, for a long time). I, for one, hope they continue to be around and keep up the good work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I love open source, BUT (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't discredit the selling power either. This probably won't hurt the sells of SuSE at all, in fact, it very well might augment sales, due to the people without fast internet connections wanting to get a taste of the YaST code. Don't count on it, but the potential's definitely there. Novell's making a good move here, I commend them.
That's probably the point. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is if it increases SuSE's penetration as a distro. Before Novell (reasonably deep pockets) bought SuSE (pretty small pockets), the distro had to be a profit centre. Now Novell can afford to allow the entire distro to be free (a la Red Hat), so that more people use it and use Novell/SuSE's server and service offerings as a result.
Novell/SuSE will want as many people to try their software as possible: making their entire distro GPL-friendly will accomplish this, along with Red Hat's official abandonment of desktop Linux. Sure, short-term this may hurt them (I was planning on purchasing 9.1 soon, I may not now). It is *because* of the long-term benefits that this makes sense.
Misleading Names (Score:1, Insightful)
Then they probably should not have named it with the "Yet Another" schema. It does not really give the idea to the user that the setup tool is an advantage or in any way innovative. Serious lack of confidence there.
Re:I love open source, BUT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good work Novell (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I love open source, BUT (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to realise that Novell's product is not a Linux distro - that was never their reasoning behind the purchase of SuSE. Rather Novell purchased SuSE to give them a strong, established Linux distro on which to base their directory service offering.
Prior to purchasing SuSE, Novell evaulated its position in the market. What they found was that while they had a kick-ass directory service product, they were being kicked in the pants when it came to new deployments - primarily by MS Windows and Active Directory.
Rather then attempt to re-build and re-position the NetWare brand among IT decision makers, Novell realised they could do much better by taking an existing base Operating System with widespread appeal, and integrating NDS with that.
Essentially Novell's cut NetWare* and tied its future to NDS on Linux.
Enter Linux. It had everything Novell needed: stability; maturity; widespread developer support; GPL (why write a new base when you can modify an existing one?); a wicked reputation among IT techs and, best of all, an increasingly bright future with the potential to topple all challengers.
Announcing NDS on Linux and then subsequently purchasing a well established Linux distro was, not to put to fine a point on it, absolute genious. NDS gets the best possible base, loss of market share to Active Directory is significantly slowed or halted (and eventually reversed if all goes to plan) and Novell regains the reputation it had among techs back in the days when MS' best offering was WfW.
GPLing YaST isn't a loss for Novell, it's a gain for Linux. Which makes it a gain for the base OS Novell will see increasing use of NDS on. Which makes it a win for Novell.
*Yes, Novell will continue to support and even offer NetWare-based NDS installations. But the fact remains that if all goes to plan, Novell will see its new business increasingly tied to NDS+Linux rather than the old bundle of NDS+NetWare
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a better rule would be not to make excuses for badly written tools.
GUI config tools should follow three simple rules:
Otherwise they are useless.
Re:I love open source, BUT (Score:5, Insightful)
Could be another reason behind opensourcing YaST: give it a GTK2 interface and wala, you've got a complete, working corporate desktop platform, which of course, they can then use to sell their own eDirectory software, and others as well... It's all about building a platform. Microsoft understood this too, how do you think they became so powerful? They built two seperate houses, both very shady but they got the job done. Then they skinned one house when they realized it was about to collaspe. Moved the skin from the first, to the second, and poof, a solid platform. Now they can sell Active Directory, Office, and other software for it, and not look like bumbling rejects.
It's all about process, format, proceedure.
Re:YasT may be good but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good work Novell (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess a lot of companies just like to sit around and brag about how good their software helps Earth; they don't really want anyone to know how it actually is because someone else's might be better. It's a huge pride issue.
Arrogancy owns the world.
Re:YaST vs. Anaconda? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Novell's doing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stop with this newb crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you change a file directly SuSEconfig can tell that has happened and will not touch it in virtually every case that I did that. But, the best approach is to edit
Why do people insist things are great for newbs when it makes ones life easier, and makes it quicker to get to the point where you want to be. Why should I spend two hours setting up a TV card manually in
Re:YaST vs. Anaconda? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It is way too complex. There is no way you can understand it all or hand edit it if required.
2. If it is corrupted, your whole OS won't even boot.
3. Its huge! 45MB of my fairly clean XP box.(although it is in a domain and has policies applied to it, etc, etc, but not much software)
4. You can't move the registry between machines, let alone between different versions of Windows. I can move my
Several smaller independent registiries might work better. e.g. one for linux conf, one for X, one for KDE, etc. So each one has a small well definied file for all configs.
OT: ftp_conn_track? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good work Novell (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah right.
MS are trying to pretend that freedom is not inevitable
It isn't. Never has been never will be.
the others (IBM, SUN, HP, etc. and now Novell) have accepted it
They haven't accepted anything. They're just milking it for whatever they can, while they can.
they want to slow it down so because it will take time to port their business models to the new way of doing software.
Stop this shit. You mean it will take time for them to come up with (some half-assed) business models, not 'port' their existing ones.
ease-of-use will come in time
And in the mean time? You're going to be repeating that for a long time to come.
I'm looking forward to all the distros now sharing installer&config code.
This makes no sense. Since installer and config code is the only thing that sets distributions apart, looking forward to 'all the distros' sharing such code would suggest that you only want one single distro; a single way of doing things. How very contradictory to the rest of the bile you just spewed forth.
We need to get the apps devels to participate too (Score:4, Insightful)
What we need is for a standardized way for the application developers to communicate the possible configuration choices and their legal values to the config tools, and for the tools to communicate these choices to the applications.
The interface must be extremely simple to use and light weight in order to be acccepted by the application developers. And it must be stand alone, not depend on any particular framwork or other libraries. The primary interface should be to the application developers, because it is their accept we need first. Our ultimate goal, to serve the users, will have to come next. We won't serve users by having a cool interface that no applications support.
I believe it can be done, though. I got such an interface accepted among Emacs developers, and I suspect similar tools are accepted in the limited domain of KDE and Gnome. That such a tool can exist in the whole domain of free software, is shown by the acceptance of the gettext interface. Those free software projects that do localization, tend to use the gettext interface. Because it is so simple, non-intrusive, and toolkit independent.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:5, Insightful)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE ->Autodesk ->
AutoCAD -> R14.0 -> ACAD-12:409 ->
Applications -> AecBase -> LOADCTRLS
is supposed to be set to 0x0000000d (13)
(as opposed to say 5)
I suggest you take that complaint up with Autodesk; MS can hardly be held responsible for how other companies store their apps' configuration settings, and the documentation they may or may not provide.
True, MS are just as bad in this respect, but surely you could have picked a better example? That's like saying that text config fles are bad, because of sendmail's one.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of these "issues" wouldn't even exist if the documentation was clear, concise, and available. Then we would be saying:
Of course it should be 13, 13 means "load last file upon launching".
Whether it's Autodesk's fault for not including some sort of documentation, or MS's fault for not requiring descriptive strings for elements in the registry is up for debate. The prevailing opinion that the MS registry sucks (as it exists today) is hardly every questioned.
For so many companies (including Microsoft) to be using the MS registry so badly, I'd shudder to think that best pratices concerning the registry are being followed (or even published).
Re:I love open source, BUT (Score:3, Insightful)
But they've been able to do this all along - the restrictions in the Yast license solely applied to commercial distribution. Giving it away for free, modifying the source etc - that's all been allowed already. I can see your point though, that someone selling the SuSE ISOs could reduce their sales.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Interestingly, those are the same rules that I followed when developing Webmin, yet another administration GUI. Other programs that keep their own databases of settings from which the actual config files are built annoy me, as they make it hard to interoperate with other tools. Some of Redhat's control panels and Linuxconf are guilty of this
Re:Good work Novell (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, humans will establish a viable colony on Mars and the war on terrorism will be over.
Open source is a great idea. It works in some cases. I see zero evidence that it's going to take over the entire universe of software. In a few cases like Linux where you are able to apply the efforts of lots of bright folks to the project, it may well win. In lots of other areas that aren't of general interest, seems pretty unlikely.
Hope it helps for Mandrake (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good work Novell (Score:5, Insightful)
Not very many companies are making a killing on OSS right now. Some, like IBM, are subsidizing it from their HW sales. Others, like Novell, Red Hat, and Ximian, are still trying to figure it out. I'd say it's a bit early to call it won.
Just about every business model, not just software, depends on control. That's why businesses spend so much money getting IP protection laws passed. Every business wants locked-in customers, it's a good revenue stream. When OSS companies start playing with the big boys (public investors), they're going to have to find a way to keep them happy.
Let's see [microsoft.com]. According to the latest FY2004 1st quarter results (ending on Sept 30, 2003), MSFT gets about 15% of their revenue from segments besides OS and Office sales.
However, if you take the time to read thru their segmentations, you'll notice that Server and Tools also includes MSDN training and tools, certifications, MS Press, consulting services, and Premier PSS - all non software revenue. According to their financial highlights, we can calculate that Consulting and PSS revenue was $231 million, and MSDN and MS Press was $190 million. Their Office segment also includes revenu from LiveMeeting and Professional PSS, but they don't give figures to calculate that portion of it.
Adding those numbers together, we can see that non-software revenue is about 20% of their total revenue. That is also significantly higher than the previous year, while their OS and Office segments have been relatively flat (do you think someone at MSFT might have noticed that?).
Okay, so we can realistically claim that 80% of Microsoft's revenue is from software sales. But, that 20% of non-software revenue (which, again, is growing) is a pretty impressive $1.7 billion (that's with a B) per quarter - that's about $7 billion a year.
To put that into perspective, VA Linux's [yahoo.com] revenue is $24 million (that's with a M) a year. Red Hat's [yahoo.com] revenue is $90 million (that's with a M) a year. Novell's [yahoo.com] revenue is $1.1 billion a year. Sun's [yahoo.com] revenue is $11 billion per year (but note that they lost money, even discounting non-recurring expenses).
IBM's [yahoo.com] revenue is a much higher $80 billion a year...but let's take a look at their cost of revenue and expenses. While MSFT [yahoo.com] earns almost an ungodly 30% profit on its revenue, IBM's [yahoo.com] profit is a paltry 8% (I didn't include non-recurring expenses)! MSFT nets more profits on it's $30 billion of revenue than IBM does on it's $80 billion! The story is much the same with HP [yahoo.com], though their profit is a even smaller 5%.
I think it's safe to say that MSFT's non-software revenue is quite healthy, and ever growing.
While I like FOSS, I've yet to see how it can sustain a viable corporate business. And, until that time comes, investor money will continue to flock to MSFT so that they can make even more $$. And, even if FOSS wins the war, expect MSFT to remain around for quite a long time. Despite what Linux zealots may think, MSFT is not stupid, and they know how to make money. In the game of business, that's what it's all about...not the ideals of FOSS.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a programmer problem, not a design problem. Not to mention that many config files are way too complex as well. One thing that's nice about config files, however, is that you can include comments. While you could do this with the registry (with the EXPAND_SZ, expand string, type) it's not optimal as it increases the size. And nobody does it. [aside]If programmer's don't want you to change values or the values are meaningless...why make it changeable? Why not hard code it?
A redesign of the registry with a seperate table for comments would be interesting, I think. That way, when using editing tools, the comment table could be referenced. But, when loading or executing software, the comments would not hinder performance.
While I somewhat agree on this point, I have to note that corrupted config files will also prevent Linux from booting. I don't know the format that Windows uses for the registry tables, but it should be recoverable. Also note that I've yet to see any registry corruption on Win2000+, except with HW failures. I think the inclusion of something similar to BartPE [nu2.nu] or ERD Commander [winternals.com] would also be a worthwhile replacement to MSFT's extremely limited Recovery Console. And frequent, automated, timed backups of the registry (at least OS configuration) should be done.
My Win2003 server, excluding registry backups and the user.dat portion, is only 23MB. 17MB of that is in HKLM\SOFTWARE (I have a lot of software installed). Perhaps someone handier than me in Linux could tell us what size all of the config files for a normal desktop come to (actual space on disk, ot just data size).
While true that you can't move some parts of the registry between machines (parts dealing with hardware and the like), software configuration is easily moved. I don't recommend moving the entire hive, as it would no doubt cause problems, but .REG files can be imported/exported with no problem. And .REG files are pretty portable (and text based), though it does require some editing and checking of data types to move from NT based to 9x based machines. With NT becoming the standard, though, that concern should go away.
Perhaps a DBA could chime in with better info, but I think that you would then be duplicating database structure overhead on each of those files. While I see the concern of a single point of failure for all software in the machine, automated backups and sensible defaults should mitigate that somewhat.
I think the main advantage of the registry is a central location for configurable values. By using a database, you should also have the advantage of database reliability and performance. Of course, the real problem with it would be getting everyone to use it.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that the files that will keep Linux from booting if corrupted are mostly static. Rarely, for example, is /etc/inittab edited. So, the likelihood that these files will suddenly be corrupted is fairly low.
The Registry is anything but static. Apps write to it all the time. That increases the likelihood that one wrong write will mess up the whole thing.
Re:Good work Novell (Score:2, Insightful)
How long until MS is forced to reduce their margins to a similar level?
YAST (Score:2, Insightful)
Though the documentation was lacking in the SuSe distro, YAST made my transition from a strictly Windows user to a multi OS user. I now use Windows strictly for playing those games that refuse to work proerly under WINE. PSSST MESSAGE TO THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY. How about improving the video acceleration of Linux! We need better games. And yes I did read the GAMES FOR LINUX ARTICLE
At any rate the article made no mention of YAST2 though. Is this to remain outside the GPL?
Re:I love open source, BUT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good work Novell (Score:3, Insightful)
Red Hat has been able to rack up profitable quarterly results in a very spending averse environment. I'd say they're a bit past figuring out how to make money. Maybe a year or so ago I would've agreed with you but I can't say the same now. Also, circumstantial evidence points to the fact that SuSe was cash flow positive when they were purchased by Novell which further bolsters the case for making money in open source.
Just about every business model, not just software, depends on control. That's why businesses spend so much money getting IP protection laws passed.
Business models aren't (or shouldn't be) based around control they're based around providing value to customers. Sometimes control is a means by which companies use to try to keep other companies from providing value in the same way. But to base your business on control is a great way to the poor house (just look at IBM and the in the 80-90's).
Every business wants locked-in customers, it's a good revenue stream.
How about providing a better product than your competitor? This is what capitalism is based on after all. Providing a better product/service than your competition so consumers will give you money. Inevitably companies based on control lose that control and crumble into ash as their product isn't competitive without the old controls. I'm not saying that a collapse of that magnitude is getting ready to happen to MS but they do need to be careful.
When OSS companies start playing with the big boys (public investors), they're going to have to find a way to keep them happy.
I don't quite understand what you mean here by "playing with the big boys" since so many Linux companies are publicly traded.
Let's see. According to the latest FY2004 1st quarter results (ending on Sept 30, 2003), MSFT gets about 15% of their revenue from segments besides OS and Office sales.
Revenue is largely meaningless (as you point out with respect to Sun). It is better to talk about profit but anyway...
MSFT nets more profits on it's $30 billion of revenue than IBM does on it's $80 billion! The story is much the same with HP, though their profit is a even smaller 5%.
This is precisely why MS is ripe for the pickings. With these profit margins MS hasn't exactly made a lot of friends with it's customers. Linux will to a degree commoditize OSes which is really the natural progression in free markets. Product / service offerings become mature, areas of opportunity for differentiation are exhausted by the market and they become increasingly commoditized. This type of environment is antithetical to the insane profit margins that MS is used to. Just look at all the deals and discounts that MS is offering to keep people from switching. That should tell you what's coming down the road. MS wouldn't offer these deep discounts unless they felt they had to because of competition.
I think it's safe to say that MSFT's non-software revenue is quite healthy, and ever growing.
Certainly MS' revenue is very large but ever growing? This is certainly not true and easily disproved. If you look at MS's 10-Q for 4Q 04 you'll see that last quarter their software revenues were flat. The only thing that gave them a positive earnings growth this quarter was their investments department. Why do you think MS has started offering a (small) dividend? Their investors demanded it for two reasons: because of the great amount of cash MS has on hand and the realization by investors that MS is no longer the high growth company it once was. How do you maintain high revenue growth rates when your OS and office suite comes shipped with just about every computer sold? The answer is you cannot unless y
Re:Good work Novell (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of an article I read just yesterday about some business guy complaining that OSS hackers weren't working on "uncool" projects like the software you just mentioned. It amounted to him just wanting stuff without having to pay for it.
OSS isn't a way for people to get any software they want for free, it's a way for a community of people to work together and build software that they ALL need. Everyone needs an Operating System, so it's better if it (or several) are available open-source and Free, so we can all benefit, rather than one or more vendors keeping it locked up, and everyone having to pay them a toll to use it. Lots of people also want to have CD burning programs, media players, drawing programs, and basic office programs (word processor, spreadsheet), so it works well for people to work together on this. Instead of everyone having to continually pay money for every new release of a word processor or CD burning program, a group of people has spent some time writing one for Free, and now everyone can stop reinventing the wheel, and spend their time and money on something new.
Pension administration systems are not part of this. No home computer user needs or wants such a thing, and no OSS hacker has any reason to waste their time working on one for no pay; if they contribute work to a media player, they benefit by getting to watch movie trailers or something, which they couldn't do before. If they work on a pension system, they get nothing.
So, for a niche product like this, the business that needs it needs to pony up the money and just buy it. If they're smart, they'll run all their systems on Free software, so instead of having to pay for OS license, CAL licenses, antivirus licenses, AND the license for the pension program, they'll only have to pay a license for the pension program and everything else will be free.
Of course, there's also the school of thought that purchased software should also be open-source--it should come with the source code in case the vendor goes belly up, so the customers can still use and develop the software on their own if necessary. This is good, but is something the customer needs to work out with the vendor that they're paying for this, and has nothing to do with freely-available OSS/Free software.