[PLUG] Novell, SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, etc.
Rich Shepard
rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Thu Nov 6 06:23:02 UTC 2003
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SuitWatch--November 6
Views on Linux in Business
--by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal
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"Novell eats SuSE. Now what?"
Thursday, November 6, 2003--So, what to make of Novell's purchase of
SuSE:
http://news.com.com/2009-7344_3-5102360.html?tag=nefd_top for $210
million in hard American cash? A lot of punditry already has been
committed on the subject, including four items alone at the CNET link
in the last sentence. But the comment I like best so far is by Nat
Friedman, who writes on his weblog:
http://www.nat.org/2003/november/, "La la la. Hacking the planet . La
la la." The three central words link to Novell's press release:
http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/11/pr03069.html on the
matter.
Of course, the release mostly is PR jive. For example, Novell wants to
provide "enterprise-class service and support on the Linux platform".
Like Red Hat, HP, Sun and IBM don't all do the same thing. But a few
items stand out, such as the phrase "from the desktop to the server,"
which appears three times in the release. Also, IBM has invested $50
million in Novell convertible preferred stock. There is accompanying
mumblage about commitment to commercial agreements between IBM and
SUSE LINUX, but there has to be another reason. What is it? News that
IBM won't buy Red Hat?
By the way, I always found the weird upper and lower case SuSE name
charming. Kinda like NeXT that way. I hate SUSE LINUX. It screams at
me for no reason. Hey, if you don't like your name, leave wrong enough
alone.
Who will buy Red Hat, anyway? Isn't that the other shoe here? I mean,
isn't Red Hat the only buyable distribution left? I've been asking
folks about that, and what little agreement I've found all seems to
point toward Oracle.
In June 2002, Oracle, Red Hat and Dell (yeah, Dell was involved... who
knew?) announced Unbreakable Linux, a few days after Caldera,
Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux announced UnitedLinux. (We covered both
here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6120 at the time.) Two
months later Turbolinux sold itself to a Japanese company and
disappeared. A few months after that, Caldera turned into SCO and SCO
turned into a volcano of anti-Linux FUD. Now, Novell's buying SuSE.
With UnitedLinux so thoroughly divided, one's mind naturally turns to
what Matt Szulik said:
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1276851 at the
Unbreakable announcement: "I guess you could call this an
'Unbreakable' partnership."
Just how unbreakable, Matt? Shopping for a ring these days?
Speaking of SCO, which I hate to do because the veins in my neck might
burst, I received a press release this morning from SCO's PR agency,
bragging about how CEO Darl McBride will be giving a keynote at
Enterprise IT Week's CDXPO:
http://www.cdxpo.com/ in Las Vegas later this month. To be unfair,
there are no less than eight keynoters at the thing, so it's not that
big a deal, but still I have to wonder: Are they insane? The press
release actually brags on this one-liner from Darl: "The Internet
created--and creatively destroyed--great wealth. It also created a
culture legitimizing intellectual property theft."
Let's see a show of hands. How many among you would like to turn back
the clock to when there was no Internet and your intellectual property
still was, presumably, safe? Thought so.
Back to Novell. I've known the company for a long time, since nearly
the beginning. I even consulted for them for a while. I think Novell
gets scant credit for a number of huge innovations, starting with
changing the network conversation from an argument between proprietary
locked-in silos to an agreement around the need for a roster of
interoperable services, including file, print, security, directory,
management, messaging and so on.
The Novell people responsible for changing that conversation, Craig
and Judith Burton, are two of my best friends. In fact, we became
friends because I was an extreme fan of the jujitsu moves they put on
everybody else in the market at that time. It was amazing to watch.
Remember Digital's OmniNet? Wang's WangNet? 3Com's 3Server? IBM's
Token Ring? Ungermann-Bass' NetOne? How about Microsoft's MSNet?
Remember the whole debate between fat and thin Ethernet cabling? Or
the various expensive proprietary forms of wiring IBM wanted you to
buy to replace whatever it was your company already had spent hundreds
of thousands to pull through your buildings? No?
Thank Novell. They blew all that up. They played rope-a-dope with
everybody else in the category, and when it was over Novell was King
Network Rat, in spades. Nobody else even was in the game.
Then, somewhere along in there, Novell CEO Ray Noorda turned into
Captain Ahab and Bill Gates became his Great White Whale. Ray wanted
to kill Microsoft. For that he bought WordPerfect, so he could compete
in office suites. He bought UNIX from AT&T and rebranded it UnixWare,
so he could compete in operating systems. He bought Digital Research
so he could get DR-DOS and needle Microsoft about ripping it off.
Worst of all, he got rid of Craig and Judith. When he retired, he left
a company with a roster of moribund acquisitions and a huge legacy
business that continues to sustain it to this day.
People have been predicting the death of Novell for ten years. But
NetWare's customer base is shrinking like the ice cap on Greenland.
One correspondent writes, "I have one huge client that's still running
on Netware 3.11 The hardware is so old that I have to go to
electronics outlets to find parts".
So the first person I wanted to talk to about the Novell-SuSE deal was
Craig Burton. He's not optimistic:
My friend, Doc Searls, likes to say "You are where you come from",
and I agree. Companies have legacy DNA that's very hard to change.
Novell may be in Boston, but they still come from Utah. And they
still come from NetWare. Look at their Web site. It's still mostly
about NetWare.
I don't have much faith that they'll ever figure out how to be an
OS vendor. They tried with Btrieve, with UNIX, with Digital
Research. And failed every time.
It's not just about being an OS company. It's about being a
developer-centric company, which you have to be if you're an OS
company. I was the one who bought Btrieve when I was there, with
the intention of making them a developer-centric company, and it
didn't happen. It took two years after the release of NetWare 3.x
before the development platform from Novell became available to
developers. Microsoft is serving developers two years before the OS
ships. You can get Longhorn specifications right now and it's two
years away. The difference between the way Microsoft and Novell
have done the OS business in the past is frightening.
But his take isn't all negative.
They can be active in services. Not only file and print, but
identity, security, presence. They can do the next generation of
file services. iFolder is a real good redirector for files services
for the Internet. It's way too NetWare-centric right now, but
presumably with these acquisitions they're going to get away from
that. And they have a really cool print server, I think it's called
iPrint, which is integrated in with directory. They don't have a
metadirectory yet, and that's a problem. I don't know what they're
going to do about that.
I really would like to see them succeed. It's just kind of late. I
hope for their sake that they're going more for the infrastructure
than for the client. If the client is their top priority, they've
got a tough row to hoe.
When I asked him why, he said this:
The issue is symmetry. Microsoft for years pushed the idea that you
needed symmetry between client and server. Both had to be the same
breed. They needed to relate only to each other. It was a lock-in
strategy.
The last Longhorn was Cairo, which was going to be the hammer that
hit the anvil that caused the customer to believe that you needed
the same platform--symmetry--on both sides. Linux and Apache blew
that all to pieces and continue to do so.
Yes, the client side of Linux has made progress, but not a lot. Not
like the server. But since you don't need symmetry anymore, that
doesn't have to matter. And there's lots of opportunity, as well as
success already, on the server side.
On other issues, they will gain a lot of new management in Europe,
which is both good and bad. It's good because Europe's tough to
break into, and it's bad because they're on a different timeline.
And just think of the cultural issues. Germany vs. Utah. Open
source vs. Novell's past business.
So the question is: Can they change where they come from? And
that's a tough one. It's something that every CEO after Ray Noorda
has failed at, so far. Only time will tell.
To balance that, I got a very positive response:
http://governmentforge.org/archives/000328.html from Tom Adelstein, in
GovernmentForge:
Those of you who recall a rather contentious company called Novell,
should clear your memory cache. Ray Noorda moved over to SCO some
time ago and took with him the likes of Darl McBride. The Novell we
once knew and about which we scratched our heads changed some time
ago. During that time, the media focused little attention on
Novell. So, we may need a refresher course...
Consider Novell a new company with new management, key personnel
and a bright and friendly smile. The sincerity and professionalism
looks very authentic. It comes from the confluence of Cambridge
Technology Partners who merged with Novell in 2001 and the
dedicated survivors of the old regime.
I've spoken at length with people in Novell management and even
took their course on Linux with Novell services.
Anyone can download it for free from here:
http://www.novell.com/training/linux/linux_linux_book.pdf. You
should find it a relatively short but extremely enlightening piece.
After today, it should become required reading for the Open Source
Community.
I have done my due diligence on Novell and like what I see. I read
all their SEC filings, tracked down management histories and read
everything on which I could get my hands. I even did calculations
on their stock prices, did timeline analysis of their financial
statements and coordinated them to significant events.
This is a new management team, very bright, very intelligent. They
had a regime change and that brought the company back to life. It's
a brand new, very exciting group of people. A new company and a
model for others to follow.
If you have any lingering pictures of Novell, put them on the side
of the road. This is all goodness for OSS. I can also tell you I
was skeptical going into my review. So, this was a pleasant
surprise.
So those are your two extremes.
Most of what I've been getting is guardedly positive, such as this
statement from Phil Windley:
http://windley.com/, former CIO of Utah:
I've been hearing some rumors of this for a few weeks. Nothing
specific, just "Novell's moving big into Linux."
Clearly this shows Novell is looking [to] be a player in a way that
they could never accomplish by just selling applications and system
add-ons for Windows. The acquisition of Ximian gave Novell a cache
of great Linux products, but that doesn't really help them out of
their funk. Novell still has a large installed base of NetWare
customers that they need to migrate to something with a future or
lose to Microsoft. Now they've got a server they can use to
backfill Netware. They can't do that with a Linux server that they
don't have pretty tight control over, so buying a Linux company is
a natural choice: it gives them a product, lots of Linux expertise
to tap, and some credibility.
This is probably a good thing for Linux users in general because
there's likely to be some good work done on making Linux work well
inside the corporate IT shop. Most large IT shops don't have the
luxury of being a pure Linux or Microsoft shop. They have to be
both. Linux has made some great strides toward being a good
corporate citizen. This provides more pressure in that direction.
I guess it's hard to find a downside.
Dave Aiello, president of CTDATA:
http://ctdata.com/ (a Linux-savvy company that builds database-driven
Web sites for companies in the New York Metro area) sees the buy as an
Open Source community play:
I think you have to look at the SuSE acquisition in the same light
as the release by IBM of Eclipse as a free product. A network
effects calculation is being done here. I think IBM looked at
Eclipse and said, this product has greater value to us if it's in
the hands of [the] Open Source community than if we keep selling
it. If we keep total control of it, we have to enhance it, market
it, and provide for the development of ancillary products from our
own resources.
If the product is backed by an Open Source community, the founders
get the benefit of free labor, free product enhancement ideas, and
ancillary product branches that they don't have to support unless
the company has an overwhelming interest.
I think this is what's happened with Netscape->Mozilla and
WebSphere Studio App Developer -> Eclipse. It is what Red Hat hopes
will happen with Fedora, and ultimately, what IBM is hoping for
with SuSE. I think IBM's ultimate interest is in having a credible
alternative to Red Hat that they have substantial influence over,
without having the overhead of developing internally.
This is more about addressing customer CIO level concerns about not
repeating the Wintel single source market than about the fact that
IBM doesn't like Red Hat's Enterprise Linux strategy, per se.
Allen Harrell, an IT outsource specialist in Arizona, says this:
If Novell can make Linux work across the enterprise regardless of
size, this is a good thing. After all, Novell was the first company
to get print services running across the network. Novell 6's client
for Windows machines is a slick piece of software. Letting you
access all the files on your network regardless of type -- an area
where Windows fails at miserably. I have a Red Hat 6 drive in my
machine right now that the BIOS picks up but Windows doesn't even
list it.
NetWare also logs off all the clients and notifies you, which
allows them to keep running while it reboots, which is an area
where Windows gives you the blue screen of death.
With Red Hat getting out of the personal OS biz:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33760.html, Lindows will get
some more traction. I mean, hell, if you can buy a Lindows computer
at Wal-Mart, those folks who were afraid of 'trailer trash' showing
up on the Net have a real good reason to fear now.
One upbeat response I've been hearing is this deal will be good for
Debian. So I asked Debian co-founder, Ian Murdock CEO of Progeny:
http://www.progeny.com, for his take. Here's what he said:
My initial reaction is that this is very good news for Linux, both
[the] industry and community.
Industry-wise, the distribution world has started to head down a
dangerous road this past year, and this move certainly promises to
shake things up quite a bit. My hope is it will shake things up
enough to allow a course correction. I'm optimistic, because from
what I've seen, Novell is doing all the right things. They seem to
understand that what's truly unique about Linux is the ecosystem
and community around Linux, and they seem genuinely interested in
building a symbiotic relationship that benefits both Novell and the
larger community of which Novell is now part.
Community-wise, the bigger our community and the bigger our
friends, the more we as a community can accomplish.
I also asked Ian about Red Hat's recent decision to discontinue Red
Hat Linux, leaving Fedora:
http://fedora.redhat.com/ in its place. He responded:
This is another case of Red Hat leaving a void in the market, and
voids equal opportunities. We're still assessing what opportunities
might exist for Progeny as a result of this latest move. I can tell
you that we've seen a lot of interest in Debian in the enterprise
over the past few months, when people first started to see this
coming, as well as a more flexible migration path from Red Hat 7.x
than [what] Red Hat is offering.
Ian also pointed to his blog, where he wrote:
http://ianmurdock.com/archives/000068.html:
The IT industry wants to break the chains of single-vendor reliance
and proprietary lock-in, whether the lock-in is based on
proprietary technology or some clever new scheme. But is the only
way to break these chains to bring everything in-house?
Actually, no. Progeny provides a third option: We're an outsource
provider of Linux distribution maintenance that allows companies to
essentially have their own Linux distributions, with a feature set,
roadmap, and support model tailored to their needs rather than the
vendor's, all without having to bring the distribution management
function in-house.
It's a non-intuitive business model for an OS company, at least at
first, because we're so used to being at the whims of our vendors.
We're so used to it that the same model has carried forward from
the proprietary OS world to the Linux distribution world. Now that
Red Hat is turning the screws on the thumbs that have been so
carefully positioned over the last several years, people are
starting to realize they moved to open-source operating systems
precisely to get away from this kind of screw-turning.
Unlike pontificating, we-solve-everything major vendors, however, Ian
doesn't pretend to have all the answers--or even close to enough of
them.
And now, a Cluetrain:
http://www.cluetrain.com-inspired question: Progeny's primary focus
is on building distributions for what we like to call
"Linux-powered products", products that are Linux-based but where
Linux is just one layer of the overall stack, and possibly an
invisible one at that. Lately, though, we've had a lot of folks ask
if we might consider applying our customer rather than
vendor-centric approach to Linux to the more general-purpose
deployment/enterprise space. Could we provide support for
enterprise Debian deployments? Could we keep the updates coming for
Red Hat 7.x after they are end-of-lifed at the end of the year?
So, market, would this be interesting to you? Talk to me, good, bad
or indifferent.
Frankly, I'm having a problem even caring about what Novell is up to.
That's because I'm fed up with the Cult of the Vendor. And that's what
this subject is all about, at least the level of attention we give to
it.
Linux isn't a vendor product. Never was, never will be. It's not even
a product. It's a project by a development community that includes
many vendors but isn't driven by any of them. Same goes for other
members of the LAMP suite, with the single exception of MySQL, which
owns the code (making it, in that sense, proprietary) but locates
development squarely inside the community rather than in its own
corporate container. In other words, they are very
unvendor-like--market-compliant, I'd say.
Development communities like Linux's grew out of the need to do what
vendors couldn't do or wouldn't do. That doesn't make vendors bad or
anything; it just puts them in perspective. They can't do everything,
and now they don't have to.
It's only natural for press guys like me to look at vendors as
leaders. We've been doing that since the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution. But there's another kind of revolution going on here, and
it isn't happening on the supply side. It's happening on the demand
side.
Linux and open source are ways that the demand side supplies itself.
Of course, in some cases the demand side also supplies--IBM, for
example. But it helps to remember that IBM went gaga over Linux only
after the OS was already widely adopted inside the company, by
technologists who in some cases also were Linux developers. The
company wisely got in alignment with the market reality it was
experiencing at the cellular level. They did it first (for a big
company, anyway), and they deserve kudos for that--but not for driving
Linux. They help a lot; but it's not their project to drive.
Perhaps Novell is going through the same kind of cell-change thing. My
point here is that it doesn't matter as much as all the breathless
headlines and analyses say it matters.
Here's how Doug Kaye, the author, analyst and Web services guru, puts
it:
Fifteen years ago the vendors provided the vision. There was no
other source. No "community" of users and certainly no Internet by
which we could share ideas. The trade shows (Comdex, NCC) and the
trade papers (Computerworld) were how we got our vision, and they
were controlled by the vendors.
High schools and colleges are now all about open source. It's LAMP
everywhere. Open source is now also the new source for "vision" for
IT managers and CIOs. How do you know what's real and not just
vaporware? Go to the bookstore and look at the O'Reilly end cap
display. There you'll see the LAMP titles: Linux, Apache, MySQL,
and the Ps. These are the technologies from which one can quickly
and inexpensively build industrial-strength applications.
Bottom line: You're on your own, but you're not alone.
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