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]

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

Re:13 years for what

[KilobyteKnight]

I am for one...

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

Time to Fork Suse

[Bruha]

Novell promised big things for Suse 10. Claiming it was a Windows Killer. I find it no better or worse than the last version of Suse 9.

What Novell is doing here is creating a platform for Ximian and the only way to get any distro to accept Ximian was to buy Suse. This apparently has proven true with Hubert's comments that Ximian had lots of talented people.

Re:13 years for what

[krgallagher]

"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

[Reducer2001]

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:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

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?

Yet another Novell failure

[stryemer]

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!

So why no KDE??

[questro]

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.

No

[RedNovember]

Wrong.

The only reason I decided to try SuSE at all was because they finally had a non-crippled, community driven initiative in SuSE 10.0 OSS. The community is something that will work for them.

Plus, SuSE is more user-friendly than RedHat, and therefore puts more consumers at ease. There is a reason RedHat is mainly a server distro.

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

[porkThreeWays]

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.

Not Unexpected. Next Stop Bankruptcy

[segedunum]

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.

Re:The question for Novell is...

[TrekCycling]

Exactly. Anyone who ever used SuSE (I used it for 3 years until they were purchased) knows Mantel if only because of the famous "Mantel Kernels" that would include special features not in the regular kernel. His contribution both to the distribution and offline were a big part of what made SuSE great in its time.

fork it?

[towsonu2003]

someone better fork (open)suse as soon as possible before it dies with novell...

Ximian division?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division

    Is that a comment on mperhaps the Ximian guys being laid off too? Goddamnit, I like Suse and would hate to see Suse founder with all of the headway they've been making in the community.

Re:13 years for what

[Miguelito]

Same here.. Suse/Novell were willing to talk to us on pricing.. someone else, who we won't name, had the attitude of "we're all anyone supports, take the price or leave it" at a time when they wanted more then windows server cost on opterons or itaniums because 64bit was automatically "enterprise class server hardware." Whatever...

Finding autoyast to be much more powerful, rpms far easier to deal with and easier build custom ones, kernel easier to patch (when we need to, which is far less often), etc.

While I'd love to actually be able to use anything, even gentoo or something else, I like that we're getting some choice now rather then only 1 distro supported.

Proof?

[alandd]

How do you know "What Novell is doing here is creating a platform for Ximian and the only way to get any distro to accept Ximian was to buy Suse." ??

And by what stretch of logic is the above "proven true" by "Hubert's comments that Ximian had lots of talented people." ???

Wish him well

[FishandChips]

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:Sour Grapes

[CyricZ]

How is SuSE different from Red Hat? Well, first of all their system has proven to be far superior each time I've tried it. Fedora Core is not suitable for production servers (even if some people claim it is), and their commercial offerings aren't much better. It would fail during installation many times. This was even with FC4. SuSE, on the other hand, would just work.

Now, will the trend of SuSE being a quality distribution continue? Perhaps not. Things aren't necessarily looking up for SuSE since the acquisition. However, as of now their products are still quite stable, and from my experiences far better than Fedora.

And for your KDE-based distro, look no further than Kubuntu. It offers a solid Debian base with all of the amenities of KDE.

TrollTech has made fantastic contributions.

[CyricZ]

You're the only one suggesting that they're dishonest. So that means you're wrong.

TrollTech has proven time and time again that they do truly care about the open source community. Even ignoring the fantastic contribution of the GPL'ed edition of Qt (on several platforms), they've made many contributions to the open source community. They have done significant work on KDE and Mozilla, for instance. The open source community would be far better off if there were more companies like TrollTech around.

Why is it that you hate TrollTech so much? It's obviously not because of their attitude towards the open source community, since they've been nothing but reasonable, and a gigantic help. Did their product allow a competitor to easily run you out of business? Did Qt render your Motif skills completely irrelevant?

Re:13 years for what

[DTC-Bob]

I was very close to Suse here in the US prior to their acquisition by Novell. I worked with them closely, and we were even called out as a Suse success story on the road show.... Let's all remember that SuSE CHOSE to sell their company to Novell. No one had a gun to their head (although speculation was that some thought the market was *going* to be the gun...)... The founders, I am sure, did nicely, thank you. Bob

Re:13 years for what

[Anonymous Coward]

you must not have "upgraded" to netware 6.5 then

netware since 4.2 has pretty much a big dissapointment to me

the OS itself is so stale and cobled together at this point, no one develops native netware NLM's anymore and the crap written in java are always stepping over each other for OS time

its just a mess, I manage close to 200 netware servers and each "upgrade" since 4.11/4.2 has been almost a step backward. Especially beyond 5.1

which is a shame because NDS kicks the hell out of AD or openLDAp

Re:13 years for what

[Stephen Samuel]

I'm thinking that it's got something to do with the the recent annoucement that Suse is standardizing on GNOME [slashdot.org]. I think that the reference to "lots of good people in the Ximian group" is a reference to that .... I'm guessing that the KDE hackers are feeling a little bit left out at the moment.

He may have figured that the combination of a powerful KDE group and a powerful Gnome group would have left the Novell linux group with a powerful one-two punch, but now the two punch (that his group was expecting to deliver) has been pulled behind the back.

Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to burst your bubble, but you're comment shows so much cluelessness that it puts even Slashdot to shame.

Ugly to develop with? Is that a technical arguement? I think not. So you have a bug up your ass and have chosen Qt as your widget toolkit of choice because of your emotional feelings. Congratulations sir, you win a cookie with your fabulous technical argument there.

As far as the cost of the Qt license paying for itself? That's for each company to decide for themselves. There's no way for you, a clueless noob, to make that decision for all companies. You don't know every company's resources, technical needs, etc. Again, way to go - once again you try to make a technical argument using nothing but FUD. I applaud you, sir... I didn't think it possible to be this arrogant and self-deluded.

Had Novell used Gtk instead of Qt they'd be firing twice as many people? Really... Wait, this just in: All of Novell's products WERE based on Gtk. Guess that disproves your crack-addled logic.

Once again, you lose.

Game over, chap.

There is a great disturbance in the Force

[zogger]

Seems like there might be a new KDE based distro coming down the pike soon. All those Novell/Suse/KDE folks getting laid off, the head cheese quitting... gee, what will they do with their "spare time" now?

he is an entrepreneur

[wikinerd]

SuSE founder is an entrepreneur. I would do exactly the same if a big corporation was interested in my small company, id est I would just sell it away and then resign from the big corporation to do something else. Entrepreneurs don't like working as employees, because they want to feel independent. I knew that he was going to leave, and I think he was right doing so. Now he is free to start something new.

Re:13 years for what

[toofast]

*applause*

Back in the day, I think the only reason Novell tacked on a GUI to NetWare was because of the pressure they were feeling from Windows NT and the new wave of "Admins" who were addicted to the mouse. NetWare 3.12/4.x was *the* file and print solution, and NDS is just so many miles ahead of Active Directory.

We run a cluster of SLES 9 servers, consisting of 4 Itanium2's, 4 x86_64's, 3 IBM Power5's and one x86, and they run flawlessly. No X, no KDE crap, just a barebones minimal install + the 25-or-so server packages we need. Keeping the OS up-to-date has been flawless as well, including Kernel upgrades.

It's nice to have a unified OS for all the hardware platforms we run.

To me, Novell rocks.