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I wonder why Novell bought them.
Par for the course, for Novell to be "buying somebody". They've ruined how many companies now, and how many did they want to ruin but weren't able to get control of. So they're just going about their normal business, trying anything, this time it's Linux, another product with little proof of profit and more hype than anything.

I keep hoping for Novell to do something right with a company they buy, and this time, they just might do it... The reason that Novell is getting interested in Linux (they've been very interested in Linux for some time now, more than 6 years, with their involvement with (the real) Caldera) is that they've announced that the next release of NetWare network services will be unbundled from the NetWare OS. It will be offered to run on NetWare OS or natively on Linux.

Now, I'm a "survivor" of the Novell/UnixWare fiasco (hell, I'm a survivor of AT&T's "Unix PC," the 7300!), and if any company could screw something like this up, it is Novell, but I'm quite hopeful that they will get their act together. They've already shown a great commitment to OSS in NetWare 6.0, replacing the Netscape Enterprise Web Server with Apache 1.3, and in NW6.5, featuring Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, and Pearl/PHP.

Mark

Hi Mark and thanks for your refreshingly positive posts.

I have a relationship with Novell as well, although I can't really say it is/was a pleasant one. We were primarily VMS with several Unix alternatives and a few DOS clients when Netware came out, and although we were already using Pathworks (VMS compatible) for PC connections it offered us a chance to try out some cheap Compaq servers (compared to what our VMS and Unix costs were, astronomical by the way).

But the documentation was the worst I have ever seen, and at the time you really couldn't call Novell inc directly for support. It was sort of a closet toy for a while, until Windows came out and PC's really started to catch on, and while Netware was a b*tch to get working with Windows, Pathworks was even worse and the VAXES were becoming a support problem.

So we used Netware for a few years, all of us attending their courses but none getting certified, simply because it wasn't a product we particularly liked. We attended those training classes because of outright need, and frustration, and the thought of spending additional time to get certification simply maddening.

Once Windows for Workgroups and ultimately NT came out, we dumped Netware like a bad dream, now running Microsoft and a few flavors of Unix for customized apps. But we feared for Unix's life when Novell got control of it, and IMO the technology was just way over their head. Do you remember how long we were waiting for Netware SMP? We didn't get the earliest version but rumor was the first processor had to be near 100% saturated before the second even would even began to utilize itself much.

I didn't realize they were already packaging mysql, are they still even fully Oracle compatible? Without a true enterprise DB they could be hurting.