[PLUG] Novell, SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, etc.

Ed Sawicki ed at alcpress.com
Thu Nov 6 08:55:02 UTC 2003


(Deliberately top-posting because I want to)

This article is a 20/20 hindsight piece. This writer is
too selective about how he portrays events and people for
my liking. He blames Ray Noorda for Novell's woes and thinks
that his friends, the Burtons, would have done a better job.

Yes, Ray Noorda fired Craig and Judith Burton, but there were
good reasons. I'm unwilling to mention the details here because
this list is archived and I see no point in digging up old dirt.
Let's just say that Craig and Judith were responsible for their
own actions and Ray had little choice. 

Yes, Ray Noorda was responsible for the WordPerfect affair that
lost Novell a ton of money. But he was also responsible for
Novell having a level of ethics head and shoulders above other
companies. Ray coined the term "coopetition" and stressed that
cooperation between Novell and its competitors would result in
a much bigger market than if they were all greedy. This meant
open protocols and standards for interoperability that would
result in a positive user experience. Microsoft was/is the
antithesis of coopetition and compatibility. Ray felt that
Microsoft needed to be dealt with to protect the marketplace -
hence, the WordPerfect affair. I probably would have done the
same at the time.

Noorda was responsible for the acquisition of Unix. His plan
was to replace NetWare's proprietary core (kernel) with Unix, so
NetWare could be an application server where standard tools could
be used for development.

Noorda was the force behind Project Corsair that he started in
1993. This was an effort to create a Linux-based desktop that
would integrate with NetWare. Novell had working prototypes.
They had a web browser before Netscape released theirs. They had
a graphical desktop. Had this project been allowed to continue,
the WordPerfect suite would have been ported to Linux. Novell
could have had a complete Linux desktop by 1997, with a word
processor that people loved.

Novell would have then supplied Unix-based systems "from the
desktop to the server" in the 1990s.

Instead, Noorda was replaced by a CEO that wanted Novell to
get back to its core business - supporting NetWare servers and
Windows clients - a recipe for, at best, a lackluster business.
It's now 2003 and Novell is back to where Ray Noorda had them
nearly a decade earlier.

Ed


On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 06:21, Rich Shepard wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> 
>                              SuitWatch--November 6
> 
>   Views on Linux in Business
> 
>   --by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal
>      _________________________________________________________________
> 
>                         This Week's Sponsor: VMware
> 
>                              VMware Workstation
> 
>    Powerful Virtual Machine Software for the Technical Professional.
>    Click here:
>    http://www.vmware.com/wl/offer/431/0 for a free 30-day trial.
>      _________________________________________________________________
> 
>                        "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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug





More information about the PLUG mailing list