Yes, Novell has a ways to go to catch up with Red Hat, but with yet another strong quarter it's becoming increasingly clear that the enterprise Linux market is a two-horse race again. Importantly, Novell is competing much more strongly without backup from Microsoft.
Novell saw its Linux business top $29 million in its second fiscal quarter of 2008 ($30 million in total Open Platform Solutions revenue), up 31 percent over the same period a year ago, with other business units also seeing healthy growth. Only its Workgroup business unit continues to founder, down 1 percent in the period that ended April 30.
More importantly (to me), I asked Justin Steinman, Novell's director of Marketing for Linux and Open Platforms, how much of this is attributable to Novell's partnership with Microsoft. It turns out that Novell is starting to really grow its Linux business on its own, though it still looks to Microsoft as a strong partner to drive interoperability:
Novell's core Linux business is growing. By "core," I mean that our non-Microsoft- related Linux business is growing. These are Suse Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions sold directly by the Novell sales force or by our channel partners, without any Microsoft certificates or Microsoft salespeople involved.
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The Open Source Census rolls forward, but I'm not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That's not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it's hard to read much into the data.
To be more representative, it will need to get more responses from those employed by larger companies. With just 22 percent of respondents employed by a company with more than 1,000 people, it's clear that the Census skews toward SMBs (small and midsize businesses, with an emphasis on the "S").
It will also need a more representative geographic spread. For example, France, which always shows up as second or third, in terms of open-source adoption in every open-source survey I've seen, apparently doesn't even scrape 2 percent of participants. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is third, behind Canada, despite its dismal commercial open-source penetration.
So the data appears to be highly imperfect, but it will get better as more participate.
The data on Ubuntu's amazing adoption, however, is nigh impossible to dispute, looking at the data.
... Read moreI will admit, I am laughing as I type this. The news that Microsoft and Novell are taking their interoperability roadshow to China is hilarious on a number of different levels.
How much do you think that China cares about U.S. patents? It has been pirating Microsoft's Windows for years (though at least, in theory, new PCs don't ship with pirated Windows)--and now suddenly it's concerned about making sure it has patent protection for Linux? My mirth runneth over.
"We are very pleased with the original approach by Microsoft and Novell to address our concerns about deploying and managing a complex high-performance computing infrastructure across two platforms. It is essential for our future competitiveness and success," Nie Hua, vice president of Chinese company Dawning Information Industry, said in Microsoft and Novell's Sunday night press release. "We fully understand the concerns surrounding intellectual property rights and feel reassured that these issues have been addressed by our vendors."
I bet! I suspect Nie Hua was crying himself to sleep at night before Microsoft and Novell approached him with this. You can just imagine his fretting: "How will I deal with the uncertainty of Linux's intellectual property position unless Microsoft, which has attempted to introduce the uncertainty, blesses my Linux distribution?" Give me a break.
Still, I give Novell credit here. Why?
... Read moreNovell's Brainshare is in full swing, and the company announced two significant deals. The first is that Hewlett-Packard will be preloading Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop on select laptops and desktops. It's a big coup for Novell after Ubuntu scored with Dell. It's also a big coup for customers who won't have to go through the bother of maintaining Linux on incompatible hardware, as I recently did with Ubuntu on Lenovo's X61 laptop.
Novell also scored with Sesame Street Workshop. This isn't a huge revenue generator but it's a fun deal. Sesame Street Workshop is a big believer in open source and has been deploying it a range of different contexts. Good to see them selecting Novell's Suse Linux...for the right reasons.
Brian Proffitt notes something on Linux Today that won't please many in Raleigh or Redmond, but which is arguably true: Linux is Linux is Linux. There really isn't much inherent in a base Linux distribution to distinguish it from its neighbors.
I think the distributions are becoming so similar in their construction, and the differences between them so subtle, the whole notion of distribution superiority is completely moot.
Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, has been saying the same thing for years.
Lately, Microsoft and Novell have tried to suggest that Suse Linux is very different from Red Hat (in terms of interoperability with Microsoft), while Oracle has been saying the exact inverse for its Unbreakable Linux (100 percent compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
They're both right. It's just a question of degree.
... Read moreThe unfortunate thing about writing all your thoughts down in a blog is that it makes it very clear just how wrong I can be sometimes. My "code" is online, for everyone to see, analyze, and critique.
And critique you do. :-)
A case in point is my fulminations earlier Thursday on XenSource and its alleged abandonment of the Xen project. John Vigeant, a friend from my Novell days and XenSource's director of Business Development, kindly swatted me in an e-mail for errors in my post.
Witness my sackcloth and ashes (with John's permission--he must have some perverse pleasure in seeing me don this hairshirt :-):
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I was fortunate to keynote this year's Ubuntu Live conference. I rarely give the same presentation twice, as I figure people are paying to hear something new. In UL's case, I spent a long time thinking through lessons I've learned from my time with Novell/SUSE and my interactions with Red Hat, and tried to come up with ways that Ubuntu could be successful yet leverage what makes it different.
In many ways, I find myself agreeing with Stephen O'Grady's Ubuntu Live keynote. Not surprising, since I think highly of Stephen. Stephen suggests that community defines the Ubuntu experience, and should be one of its primary differentiators:
... Read moreTo take the pebble, then, Ubuntu needs to reframe the debate. To do that, it must turn the conversation from basic operating system shootouts to the operating experience. A conversation that, in my opinion, favors Ubuntu.
Markus Rex is leaving Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server project for the time being to take over as chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation.
At the foundation, Rex replaces Ian Murdock, the Debian Linux founder whom Sun Microsystems hired to be chief operating system officer in March. Rex will take Murdock's role not only as CTO of the foundation, but also as chairman of the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a years-old but so still incomplete effort to make it easier for software companies to ensure compatibility with various incarnations of the open-source operating system.
"I need a full-time CTO over here. (Murdock) is a busy guy at Sun. The intent was always to replace Ian as CTO," said foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. In addition to overseeing the LSB, Rex will handle technical duties such as leading the foundation's interactions with programmers and a program that lets developers sign nondisclosure agreements so they can write software support for unreleased hardware
The foundation was formed last year through the merger of two other organizations trying to oversee some elements of Linux, the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Developer Labs.
Rex joined then-independent German Linux seller Suse in 1999 and stayed with the company through
Zemlin, not surprisingly, bridled when I asked if the LSB has been chiefly of "academic" rather than practical interest. It's true that the allies working on the standards effort have put many years' work into winning support from those who sell or distribute Linux and writing software that makes it easier to test for compliance to the standard.
But he and Rex did acknowledge that software companies by and large still certify not to LSB, but to specific products such as SLES or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
"Now that we've got LSB permanently anchored in all the operating systems, we need to get application vendors to adopt it and encourage application vendors to use LSB as their basis," Rex said. "For that, we have some work to do. We have to broaden the scope."
Even for those such as Adobe Systems who don't certify to LSB, though, they often use LSB as a stepping stone in the certification process, Zemlin added. And, he added, Rex is the "perfect guy" to build relationships with software companies and encourage them to use the LSB's testing tools.
Update: In an e-mail, Murdock said he's stepping down as LSB chairman now that there's a new Linux Foundation CTO. "Markus Rex is eminently qualified to lead this important effort forward, and I look forward to continuing to work with him in his new role," he said.
The headline is a bit of a joke, but the news is serious: Novell just announced Europe's largest rollout of Linux desktops with the Italian Parliament. Approximately 3,500 PCs will be migrated to Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, including those belonging to the 630 members of parliament. Not too shabby.
This makes it the second and largest parliament in Europe to choose open source. The French Parliament, with 577 seats, voted last year to have open source installed on all of its 1145 PCs. France decided on Ubuntu this February, and the migration in the Parliament should be under way.
The size of the Italian migration to open source makes it an important case study, said Pietro Folena, member of the Italian Communist party, who earlier this year proposed the switch. "It will present all public offices with best practices."
See, I told you the Communists were behind the move. And why not? Italy expects to spend 10 percent of what it was spending on Windows. Even a Communist is entitled to save money.
Microsoft on Thursday began taking evasive action to avoid being pinned down by provisions in the new version 3 of the General Public License (GPL).
The company issued a statement declaring itself not a party to GPL 3. And regarding coupons it sells that entitle customers to
"At this point in time, in order to avoid any doubt or legal debate on this issue, Microsoft has decided that the Novell support certificates that we distribute to customers will not entitle the recipient to receive from Novell, or any other party, any subscription for support and updates relating to any code licensed under GPL 3," the company said, though it left the door open to a revision of this policy later.
The GPL 3, issued last week, is a significant update of the most widely used license in the open-source programming realm.
Microsoft's move is a response to a provision in the GPL 3 that, according to the Free Software Foundation, means that patent protections Microsoft extends to Novell's Suse Linux customers are automatically extended to any users of GPL 3 software in that package.
Microsoft disputed this position.
"While there have been some claims that Microsoft's distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPL 3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law," Microsoft said.
