[ILUG] Novell A Linux Leader? GPL 3 and

[David Murphy]

As ex-Novell 15+ year vet. out of Provo and back in the ould sod.

Novell could stand to make good, if Exec's (company now run out of Boston)
do something about Jack.
Stone would have been better, just have to look at how Jack handled the
Proxy voting for the AGM wrt. to resolutions, talk about protecting turf.

Novell during the years has had some great tech, and could have gone Linux
much earlier, serveral times.
Circa early 90's Caldera was the remnant's of the old Linux group from
Novell, but who needed them when we just brought USL, :-(((.

SuperNos, could have been great if not for the fights concerning the soul of
the company, New Jersey vs Provo (funny that the company HQ went to Boston
eventually).

There where other attempts at doing Linux internally in early 2000's, couple
of years before SUSE or Ximian were brought.  Now a lot is moving to
Bangalore in attempts to lessen costs.

However, there still is a  core of the old NetWare group in Provo, and if
they get additions into the kernel for support of hardware that was present
in NetWare, it will only make the kernel perform all the better.
Dana Hendriksen and Jim Nicolet both can make code hum.

As with most things in Novell, Management can always snatch defeat instead
of victory, (saw to many management screw-ups while there).

Lots of in-fighting over KDE vs Gnome, Germany vs Boston, but Gnome will win
that one since Ximian is in Boston, next to the Exec's ear.

If things don't change too much, then SUSE will be a stable platform, just
look at how well NetWare performed in the past, how stable it was and
Novell' dedication to backwards compatibility, still supporting (somewhat
unofficially) code released a dozen years ago, e.,g. NetWare v4.11.  The
same will probably happen with Linux too, since buisness cycles are so much
slower than the latest hot thing.

Cannot speak to GPL v3 as have not read it yet.



On 2/7/06, AJ McKee <aj.mckee at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Morning All,
>
> I am throwing this out here just as random brain thoughts and also to
> see what everyone elses take on things are at the moment.
>
> I've been evaluating a lot of Linux products recently. I must say I am
> finding the Novell/Suse range to be extremely well polised and
> designed to meet business needs especially in the SMB marketspace.
> What are, if any your thoughts on Novell as a company as a whole (They
> are going through a little trama at present) and their product range.
>
> Secondly whats you take on GPL 3 and Linus' take on it. BTW this all
> comes to light after reading
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/06/torvalds_gpl_analysis/
>
> Ta in advance.
> AJ
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