Suse Linux Founder Exits Novell 245
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."
13 years for what (Score:2, Insightful)
Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns? (Score:3, Insightful)
Novell standardise on GNOME: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/05
Re:"Too Late"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Novell is going the RedHat way (Score:2, Insightful)
BTW, Ubuntu's based on Debian, which was and remains community-developed. Shuttleworth just did it right (so far)...
The question for Novell is... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Time to Fork Suse (Score:2, Insightful)
Please show us a link or two to support your position.
My Bet (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:13 years for what (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that "insightful"?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Time to Fork Suse (Score:2, Insightful)
I have been on the fence, but this does it (Score:1, Insightful)
So I've always been hoping for another group to step up. I thought I had found it with SuSE, where I experenced for the first time on Linux, something approaching a fully integrated GUI.
However, this move signals that Ximian is going to start to get their hands all over SuSE and essentially ruin it. I hated the Ximian Desktop and those guys have absolutely NO SENSE WHATSOEVER about polish and quality. They royally suck. Then, add in stupid crap like MONO and that whole nonsense, and it's so easy to decide it's not even funny. GNU classpath is almost there, Eclipse already compiles and runs on Fedora core.
You can get every level of fully community supported+bleeding edge, community supported on top of enterprise-ready (whitebox, centos, etc.), all the way to complete enterprise support.
It's been a long, hard fought and well deserved win for RedHat in the area of Linux dominance through proper leadership instead of strong-armed tactics. I'm going all Fedora/RedHat on all my new systems.
Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Novell is going the RedHat way (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, damn those Novell people, open sourcing all the good bits from the companies they've acquired. They're just doing it because they want the community to help them! Let's not fall for it though-- we should all refuse to use YaST or the Evolution connector! If I make it so I can't connect to my e-mail, that'll show'um!
They're making the life of all those shuttleworths' out there extremely easy.
Yeah, because... it all plays into Shuttleworth's plan for world domination?
Damn it, Shuttleworth doesn't want Novell bringing more money into Linux development. Ubuntu is so good, we should just tell all the other developers, contributors, and people spending money on Linux to shove it!
Re:Sour Grapes (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Novell-Borg screw up again (Score:1, Insightful)
It recognizes some good tech,
gets it,
survives for a while,
then screws up.
And then it needs to move to the next one..
Re:Yet another Novell failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns? (Score:2, Insightful)
Gtk is ugly to develop with, inconsistent, lacks a lot of functionality and it is a complete joke for multi-platform development.
Qt is so superior to Gtk it pays for itself so soon you will never regret buying it. A Qt license is worth half the pay of one developer for one month. Your company will recover that money immediately.
Had Suse used Gtk instead of Qt, Novell would be firing twice the people they are firing now. And the movement from Qt to Gtk is so stupid they are firing theirselves on the foot.
Bye, bye, Novell, you had the best (Suse Linux, ZenWorks and eDirectory) and you decided to suicide.
Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:13 years for what (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Sour Grapes (Score:3, Insightful)
How is that a mistake? Novell has something no other distribution has. A front seat to NDS. In fact, I'm pretty sure their whole original reason for their buying SuSE was to have a solid OS platform to run NDS off of. They probably were not even running against Redhat or Sun. It could be a Hail Mary comeback for network services management on Microsoft shops. Even if they're only partially sucessful, it salvages their original intellectual property (NDS). Also, initially, there might have been some hope of getting bought out by Sun. (Back many quarters ago, Sun had cash and was looking to acquire properties.)
You are a sad, sad man. I hope you're still a kid. You base SuSE's distribution quality solely on the desktop it decided to consolidate upon. If Novell's entire strategy counted on its KDE users, it would be stillborn. The entire linux market is a zit on corporations' ass. Its total presence is server based. If Novell wants to claw onto the desktop/server market occupied by Microsoft, are they going to do it with a feature filled desktop that has Exchange compatibility, or with a relatively unknown KDE, who they have no pull in terms of guiding its development? Sun is Gnome, and Redhat is Gnome. And that is the environment any Fortune 500 company is going to consolidate upon. Novell wants to cut bodies, not keep KDE users happy. Grow up.
Re:Novell moves to GNOME; SuSE founder resigns? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
curse of Novell (Score:3, Insightful)
and who founded Caldera? and what are they now?
exactly
Re:13 years for what (Score:2, Insightful)
Quality matters, and it showed with SUSE up until now. Novell is deprecating the OS and the people as well.
Re:So why no KDE?? (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE is built on QT [trolltech.com], a C++ framework released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) [gnu.org], a free software license that has strong copyleft [gnu.org] (forced sharing) protections meant to ensure that derivative code stays free.
Some corporations are raising hell against QT and KDE because the corporations want to make proprietary, non-free, closed-source software on the QT framework without compensating the makers of QT. Of course, those same corporations don't have to pay anything if their applications are free and open source. In this way, QT is actually encouraging companies to give back to the community, something beneficial for users as a whole.
Debunking KDE Myths [urbanlizard.com] does a good job disproving the FUD against KDE and QT.
Ximian does kernel stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sour Grapes (Score:2, Insightful)
chasing the exchange rainbow is about as fruitful as chasing a real rainbow due to practicalities. a much more sound solution is getting people off of exchange and onto something more friendly. most companies that run exchange could do just as well with one of the alternatives out there.
but going around claiming "exchange compatibility" is just a way to lose credibility when people do their homework and check out the validity of said claim. losing credibility is not something the open source desktop needs right now.
Re:13 years for what (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:13 years for what (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
So which of these organisations ended up calling the shots at Novell when it comes to Linux? Ximian, of course! And right from the start it seemed that Ximian's main product was FUD and vaporware.
I guess this is a case of brown-nosing and PR winning over great products and solid engineering.
Yeah, the investors are clamoring for cost cuts... (Score:2, Insightful)
From the article -
"The pressure is growing on Novell Inc's management to make major strategic changes after a regulatory filing revealed a Novell shareholder has joined Credit Suisse First Boston in calling for change at the identity management and Linux vendor."
"...a call from financial analyst house Credit Suisse First Boston for Novell to improve its vision, strategy, and execution in order to become a more profitable business."
PHB -> English Translation - Cut R&D, sell off consulting arms, ZenWorks, Groupwise - i.e. turn us a quick profit by selling your gems so that we can then drop this hot potato and move on to our next investment if our "vision" doesn't quite pan out
Novell is going the way of HP it looks. Sad, as Novell really does have good products. I used to bash Novell till I worked in a 100 server Novell environment with NDS, before active directory copied it, and realized that long term planning and R&D is what makes Novell so worthwhile.
Open source has entered the equation and that's where the buzz is, so the MBAs are wondering why Novell is piddling around with all this legacy crap when they see companies like Red Hat making it big time off the Linux craze. Their following another bubble and these people are idiots.
Focus on customer needs through proper R&D rather than blind pursuit of particular technologies, and you'll outdo your competitors easy, the rest is marketing, where Novell actually does need help. It's all fine and good to adopt Linux, but without proper technical understanding those calling for restructuring will leave Novell seriously lopsided, and even worse, undifferentiated from others in the market.
We saw it all coming (Score:3, Insightful)
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[Article: Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire SUSE]
I see three scenarios: (Score:4, Insightful)
by Qbertino (265505) on Tuesday November 04, @09:58AM (#7386243)
1.) Novell does a f*ck up with SuSE, goes down the drain and pulls SuSE along until they're bought out by somebody else. This is somewhat likely, as SuSE is doing very good as a Linux brand right now. It could hardly get better rather than worse. In germany (most Linux users per capita) SuSE is even synonym for Linux!
All in all that would stall Linux brand recognition but probably be good news for Mandrake, the last one left.
2.) Novell has actually seen the light and plans way ahead into the future, were software won't make a buck anymore, but free software will reign and the business is in services.
3.) Novell/SuSE twitches here and there, barely surviving, taking shares from Mandrake, they all die eventually, Mickeysoft prevails and there is a 5 year setback for OSS, with only Gentoo and Debian to the rescue in the far future, when the OSS model has consumed everything.
Bottom line:
I don't like this news. Sound bad. Chances are to high that this once o-so big company Novell is gonna screw up. And SuSE is my first recomendation to n00bs right now. It would be a real shame for them to go down the drain.
______
Looks like number one was a hit. Novell didn't see the light. The didn't plan ahead. They're visionless and now sqirming around probably just to prolong some classic VC money. I can just imagine the people involved summoning all efforts to pull their head out of the noose as we speak. They fallen for some hothead geeks and their buzz at Ximian as a last resort, but couldn't convey that spirit into a big business. Unlike Ximian - more or less a geeks workshop - SuSE was a *big* company with lots of disciplined fulltime professionals maintaining a frontline distro. The simple truth is that SuSE was a bigger Linux company than Novell will probably ever be, with one of the longest track records in the OSS industry. Novell on the other hand is just inflated stock and some karma and credit from a decade ago when they were big in the network business. Instead of throwing their marketing value behind SuSE and tuning low on the rebranding & bullshit strategy they did it all wrong. Nothing less than a major botch. Bad move, you stupid execs. No mercy here.
Note Number 3 above. This is what's actually going to happen. If Novell goes belly up, which I expect more than ever, that will be the end of commercial distros as we know it.
BTW: The current rise of Apple with their small, simple and cheap all-in-one appliances doesn't help the current situation for x86-OSS-as-MS-alternative either.