Posts Tagged ‘novell’

Linux Vendors: United They Will Stand?

Ever since reading OStatic’s article about how Linux netbook returns really aren’t the problem with Linux market share, I can’t seem to quite get over the conclusion. They make an excellent point. Microsoft has lots of money and can afford to throw a lot of it at marketing. And Linux vendors? Not so much. To ‘requote’ (RQ?) Joe Brockmeier from Novell:

“If you took the marketing budgets of all the Linux vendors combined, and then doubled that figure, and then added a zero, you might start approaching what Microsoft spends on marketing Windows. Maybe.”

Wow. That’s one heck of a deficit to overcome. The funny thing about the software business is that as long as your technology is ‘good enough’, often that’s all it takes. From there it’s marketing. It’s sad, but true. It’s not that one has to match dollar-for-dollar, but that’s certainly not a difference that’s easily compensated for.

Okay, so there’s a problem. What’s the solution? Let’s read on in Brockmeier’s quote:

“The ad councils for various industries have the right idea — it’s a good idea to pool your money to grow the market when you’re jointly competing with another industry.”

This is where I have to disagree. Pooling money for marketing from Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell (and perhaps some lesser-known Linux vendors) for the benefit of whom? Linux? What Linux? Ubuntu? Red Hat? SUSE? If I were a Red Hat shareholder, I wouldn’t exactly appreciate my dollars being spent marketing ‘Linux’. While I like Linux, Red Hat needs to market Red Hat.

Is this what Linux has come to? A charity that vendors can pool their money into with the hopes of getting something out of it? Now, it is true that these vendors rely upon Linux upstream to have a product to sell, but as long as there are differences in distributions, there will be different marketing strategies. And that’s for good reason. Ubuntu is popular on desktops and laptops. Red Hat is not. In fact, Red Hat appears to not even care about the desktop market. SUSE fits somewhere in the middle there.

Can the three combine marketing strategies? Maybe. While I definitely like the idea of Linux dominating both the server and client operating system market shares, I would hate to see tension created between vendors because advertising doesn’t help out each equally. That would just serve to hurt all three. As a community, Linux vendors can’t even agree on a sound subsystem, let along a marketing strategy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Aug 16th, 2009

Deploying Linux Just Got Easy with SUSE Studio

Deploying Linux out to hundreds of desktops or as a downloadable appliance just became a really easy task to accomplish. I knew that Novell had a trick up their sleeve with SUSE Studio, but I had no idea how big it was until I tried it out today. They just brought the service out of beta today so I thought I’d try it out and was I ever surprised.

SUSE Studio is offered by Novell as an online service to build appliances for VMware, Xen, Live CDs, or disk images for deploying desktops, servers, or anything in between using your choice of openSUSE, SUSE Enterprise 10 or Enterprise 11. Seriously, you just pick the one you want:

Choose Machine Type

Choose Machine Type

Just before the build, you can pick the type of deployment you want:

Choose Appliance Type

Choose Appliance Type

When building your image you can install whatever software you want from the repositories by searching or drilling down the interface through the categories.

Studio Package Management

Studio Package Management

You can upload files, run scripts after build or at bootup. You can manage network settings, add built-in users, and configure services.

Startup Scripts

Startup Scripts

General Settings

General Settings

Simply choose the type of appliance you want to build and click the build button. In a few short minutes I had a working image. The best part is that you can boot up your image and test it out without even downloading it. They have a previewer that runs in the browser and is a fully-capable machine except that outbound networking is turned off (for obvious reasons).

Test Drive at Desktop

Test Drive at Desktop

There’s lots of options and no way that I could mention them all. If you’re looking to deploy your application via Linux “appliances”, there’s not a better way than I can think of except offer an EC2 AMI, but that’s fairly limited if you are working with customers who have already deployed other virtualization offerings and aren’t looking to spend more money.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips, News : Comments (0) : Jul 29th, 2009

Linux Distros Have Had ‘App Stores’ For Years

It appear that the next company to join the ‘App Store’ bandwagon will be Novell. According to PCPro, they’re considering launching an App Store for netbooks, much like vendors have been doing in Apple’s footsteps for the mobile phone market. The App Store would be in the openSUSE version of Moblin and would essentially allow users to install open source applications with a few clicks on their netbooks. One of the things that they’re depending upon to attract users to the platform and store is the fact that its applications are available for free.

What I find completely ridiculous about this whole thing is that it just might work. Linux users (including openSUSE users) have had repository after repository open for them to use for years. openSUSE (or Ubuntu, Red Hat, take your pick..) have had the ability to have these few-click installs for their users this whole time but most people don’t know what a repository is.

Novell VP of Business Development Holger Dyroff told us that “it’s also a method of educating people about the benefits of open source”. I don’t think this will work for educating people about open source, however. People will learn that “open source app store” means free as in price and not care about free as in freedom. Good or bad, this idea of an app store does seem to have brought this idea of repositories of software to be installed to the masses.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 9th, 2009

Novell/SCO Case Finally Put to Rest

The lawsuit between Novell and SCO over the ownership of UNIX has finally been settled. A judgement was ruled in mid-July that SCO owed Novell $2.5 million and the final judgment was handed down today holding that ruling and adds interest. SCO sold licenses to Sun and Microsoft for the UNIX code that, as it would turn out, Novell actually owns. They then proceeded to go after some of the larger Linux vendors and customers such as Red Hat, IBM, DaimlerChrysler, and AutoZone claiming that Linux was just a copy of UNIX. The federal court ruled that SCO owes Novell not only the $2.5 million, but also $918,000 in interest and $489 per day from August 29 to November 20. SCO is in the midst of filing for bandruptcy already and will not be able to pay Novell in full at the moment.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Nov 24th, 2008