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Novell has been in trouble for quite a few years. Ever since they bought Suse and Ximian they've just been lost. Part of that you can lay directly at the execu

Novell has been in trouble for quite a few years. Ever since they bought Suse and Ximian they've just been lost. Part of that you can lay directly at the executives that came with the acquisitions. The open source side of the business is schizophrenic. With Miguel De Icaza building a clone of every new fad microsoft technology that comes along. Not a fantastic way to build a solid, durable business.

jrockway 17y ago
You can't blame de Icaza for creating excellent free software and giving it to the community. Mono is faster than Microsoft's own VM in many benchmarks. Novel and de Icaza have done a lot for GNOME, as well. (I don't use traditional Linux desktops anymore, but if you use KDE and GNOME for a while, you'll notice that GNOME is a lot less crashy compared to KDE. This is because most of the apps are managed code, C# or Python, while KDE is all C++. It does make a difference.) Anyway, it's not de Icaza's fault that Novel can't use their excellent software to make money. He is just a programmer; his job is to program, not to make Novel highly profitable.
- tzury 17y ago
  i wish I could have give you more than one point for this comment.
- mbreese 17y ago
  I have to agree and disagree with this... On one hand, it seems like the main open source software that comes out of Novell recently is Mono/.NET related. So, regardless of how much other stuff they do, this is what they are known for. So, if you like Mono, you'll love Novell. If you hate Mono, you'll dislike Novell. This doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground in this. According to Wikipedia, his title is VP of Developer Platform. So, his job isn't just to program, but to bring developers in. But if he's ostracized a large group of developers with Mono, that can't be a good thing. So yeah, he's not on the business side, but he is management... so making Novell profitable is part of the job description. And the effectiveness of the strategy that Novell has taken since acquiring SuSE and Ximian is at least up for debate. From an outside perspective, it does seem to be pretty rudderless. Trying to merge the Ximian (GNOME) group with the SuSE (largely KDE-based) group is a pretty good example. That's not to say that Mono hasn't brought in some business for Novell, but I'm not in a position to speculate on this one way or the other. (This isn't to knock Mono or GNOME or anything else he's touched... I'm just looking at it from a strictly business point of view. I'm pretty ambivalent on Mono, personally).
  - jrockway 17y ago
    The only people that don't like Mono are politicians, not programmers. If you are a programmer, it's another potential tool in your toolbox. (I am probably not going to use it, as I prefer Haskell to F#. But I certainly don't think there's any problem with it existing.)
    - hexis 17y ago
      Programmers might not be interested in politics, but politics are interested in programmers.
  - bad_user 17y ago
    Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise is hardly Mono/.NET related. And I don't know of any recent / remarkable developments coming from Red Hat. They are known for Mono only because people have been bitching and screaming about it since the project started. Novell is having a hard time because in the business of providing support for open-source products, there's no place for number 2. If you want to buy support for a Linux distribution, you either pay for the number one, which is Red Hat, or get Cent OS or Debian, relying on the huge communities behind them. Merging Ximian with SuSE wasn't a good idea indeed. But at the time Gnome seemed like the better choice for corporate Linux, and IMHO it still is. Red Hat was using it, it's more stable and predictable, and you wouldn't need a commercial license to develop commercial software on top of it (like KDE at that time). The acquisition I couldn't understand was SUSE. Betting on Mono does make sense. Developers and companies using dotNet are willing to pay for their tools, for their servers, and for support. They are even paying for add-ons to their IDE (like JetBrains ReSharper). So if you want to migrate to Linux, what's the best distribution for you? SUSE of course. Unfortunately open-source doesn't sell well. You can use it as a catalyst for your other products, you can use it to gain market-share, you can rely on a community to bring improvements to your infrastructure (when you don't have the resouces for that), but making money straight out of open-source? That's not easy. Miguel and his team are moving in uncharted territories ... they are in the process of releasing two commercial products for Mono ... MonoTouch and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Both are quite interesting.
scorpioxy 17y ago
I think you got that the other way around. Novell bought Ximian because they were lost and trying to rebuild the business. The deal was that the Ximian people would help Novell out. Novell would use Ximian's software to offer complete platforms again. But, always be mindful of the suits.

jrockway 17y ago

You can't blame de Icaza for creating excellent free software and giving it to the community. Mono is faster than Microsoft's own VM in many benchmarks. Novel and de Icaza have done a lot for GNOME, as well. (I don't use traditional Linux desktops anymore, but if you use KDE and GNOME for a while, you'll notice that GNOME is a lot less crashy compared to KDE. This is because most of the apps are managed code, C# or Python, while KDE is all C++. It does make a difference.) Anyway, it's not de Icaza's fault that Novel can't use their excellent software to make money. He is just a programmer; his job is to program, not to make Novel highly profitable.

tzury 17y ago
i wish I could have give you more than one point for this comment.
mbreese 17y ago
I have to agree and disagree with this... On one hand, it seems like the main open source software that comes out of Novell recently is Mono/.NET related. So, regardless of how much other stuff they do, this is what they are known for. So, if you like Mono, you'll love Novell. If you hate Mono, you'll dislike Novell. This doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground in this. According to Wikipedia, his title is VP of Developer Platform. So, his job isn't just to program, but to bring developers in. But if he's ostracized a large group of developers with Mono, that can't be a good thing. So yeah, he's not on the business side, but he is management... so making Novell profitable is part of the job description. And the effectiveness of the strategy that Novell has taken since acquiring SuSE and Ximian is at least up for debate. From an outside perspective, it does seem to be pretty rudderless. Trying to merge the Ximian (GNOME) group with the SuSE (largely KDE-based) group is a pretty good example. That's not to say that Mono hasn't brought in some business for Novell, but I'm not in a position to speculate on this one way or the other. (This isn't to knock Mono or GNOME or anything else he's touched... I'm just looking at it from a strictly business point of view. I'm pretty ambivalent on Mono, personally).
- jrockway 17y ago
  The only people that don't like Mono are politicians, not programmers. If you are a programmer, it's another potential tool in your toolbox. (I am probably not going to use it, as I prefer Haskell to F#. But I certainly don't think there's any problem with it existing.)
  - hexis 17y ago
    Programmers might not be interested in politics, but politics are interested in programmers.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise is hardly Mono/.NET related. And I don't know of any recent / remarkable developments coming from Red Hat. They are known for Mono only because people have been bitching and screaming about it since the project started. Novell is having a hard time because in the business of providing support for open-source products, there's no place for number 2. If you want to buy support for a Linux distribution, you either pay for the number one, which is Red Hat, or get Cent OS or Debian, relying on the huge communities behind them. Merging Ximian with SuSE wasn't a good idea indeed. But at the time Gnome seemed like the better choice for corporate Linux, and IMHO it still is. Red Hat was using it, it's more stable and predictable, and you wouldn't need a commercial license to develop commercial software on top of it (like KDE at that time). The acquisition I couldn't understand was SUSE. Betting on Mono does make sense. Developers and companies using dotNet are willing to pay for their tools, for their servers, and for support. They are even paying for add-ons to their IDE (like JetBrains ReSharper). So if you want to migrate to Linux, what's the best distribution for you? SUSE of course. Unfortunately open-source doesn't sell well. You can use it as a catalyst for your other products, you can use it to gain market-share, you can rely on a community to bring improvements to your infrastructure (when you don't have the resouces for that), but making money straight out of open-source? That's not easy. Miguel and his team are moving in uncharted territories ... they are in the process of releasing two commercial products for Mono ... MonoTouch and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Both are quite interesting.

scorpioxy 17y ago

I think you got that the other way around. Novell bought Ximian because they were lost and trying to rebuild the business. The deal was that the Ximian people would help Novell out. Novell would use Ximian's software to offer complete platforms again. But, always be mindful of the suits.