Posted 12:24 PM (0) comments

What does "is" mean? [update]

Earlier this week, CNet writer Robert Lemos published a story about Novell and the future of NetWare ("Novell may nix NetWare development")in which he claimed that Novell exec Chris Stone had said that there would no longer be any development of the NetWare platform. Novell CEO Jack Messman then came out with a statement denying that Novell would be killing NetWare. But the key, here, is what each is referring to as "NetWare" and what will happen to it.

NetWare is the so-called "Red Box" product which includes a core networking operating system, libraries, utilities, services and applications. But "NetWare" also refers to the core OS, the "kernel" that powers all the rest. Its development of the kernel that will stop, indeed already has. The services, utilities, etc. will continue to evolve, but mostly for a platform consisting of a Linux kernel and only secondarily for the legacy NetWare kernel.

Novell will continue to develop and sell "NetWare", the amalgam of services for Linux. They will continue to sell (but not develop) the NetWare kernel which will support many of those same services.

Its all about the words you choose and how you define them.

[update 8/8] Lemos has a new interview with Stone appearing today in which he tries to pin down this issue, but ultimately let's Stone dance and waffle around it.

UPDATE: The Burton Group's Jamie Lewis, who's very familiar with Novell, has some interesting commentary on the whole affair.

Posted 9:10 AM (0) comments

Sweatshops?

What do you call a company whose product is built by hundreds, even thousands of unpaid workers who get no paid vacation, no health care, no retirement certainly no stock options - none of the compensation that most workers in the civilized world take for granted? You call the company Red Hat, or SuSE.

Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik told the LinuxWorld throng " We will prevail," and they cheered, thinking it was about them. But its not. Its about Szulik and the other execs at Red Hat who get the big salaries, the perks, the stock options, the health insurance - all the trappings of corporate America - while the people writing the code get nothing.

The so-called war between proprietary systems and so-called "open source" systems is a phony war. Its not David vs. Goliath, the "lone coder" vs. big business. The big business interests are riding all of the horses in this race including some of the biggest, such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. They're all trying to make a buck off the sweat of the unpaid code warriors. Tell us, Mr. Szulik, how many lines of Linux code have you written? And how much have you made for distributing it? He actually told this crowd,it's "because of people like you that made voluntary contributions, that allowed us to build an organization that is publicly traded." And they cheered him! PT Barnum was, in deed, right.

Posted 11:19 AM (0) comments

For the Utah County Attorney

SCO is at it again. They're attempting to shake down businesses by offering to sell them a license to use SCO's supposedly infringed intellectual property in their Linux distributions - as long as they only have it in binary form (so you couldn't see the code if you wanted to!). All without ever proving there is infringed code or even indicating which code might be subject to the infringement charge!

That's extortion and that's subject to the racketeering laws. We should demand the proper authorities (in this case, the Utah County Attorney) immediately indict the various co-conspirators in Lindon

Posted 9:28 AM (0) comments

Big Blue as White Knight?

An article in ZDNet Australia ("IBM rules out PeopleSoft white knight play") indicates that Big Blue won't be "rescuing" PeopleSoft from the "evil clutches" of Larry Ellison by making a friendly offer to buy the Pleasanton, CA applications company. Steve Mills, the senior vice-president and group executive of IBM's Software Group, is quoted as saying: "We're not in the applications business..."

Two things wrong with that, Steve. First, that's why the PeopleSoft customers want you to buy the company (as opposed to Oracle), thinking you'll keep the applications available! And second, IBM's been in the applications business longer than anyone else in the computing industry! That's why the IBM website has a page called "Applications - Desktop & Enterprise"!!!

Looks like Steve needs to spend more time learning what his department really does.

Posted 10:00 AM (0) comments

A Policy for Policies?

Policies were introduced to networks so that administrators could apply rules to groups of users rather than having to implement each rule one-on-one with each affected user. Policies saved a great deal of time. But, as my Network World colleague Jim Kobielus points out this week, the sheer volume of policies is threatening to render them useless as a security safeguard. In his column "Prioritized policy routing needed", Kobielus urges adaptation of a standardized Message Oriented MiddleWare (MOM) protocol for networks and especially for web services, before the entire thing bogs down and we have to revert to armies of clerks implementing hundreds of rules for thousands of users on a one-on-one basis. Keep your eye on this, I'm sure there will be at least three competing proposals for a "standard" before the year is out! (I say with tongue only slightly in cheek!)