[KLUG Members] Novell/Linux Preso Today

[Adam Williams]

> I attended the Novell/Linux presentation at M-TEC in Kalamazoo today. The
> presenter was Scott Lewis, Director of Solutions Management for Novell North
> America. Not just another sales dude...this guy was from near the top of
> management at Novell. (When you have "of North America" in your title...) He had
> quite a bit to say, and most of it was without a "salesman" approach. Some of
> the highlights for me:

And of course you remembered to drop the KLUG name as often as
possible?! :)

> - Novell is seeing more opportunity for the adoption of OSS at the desktop with
> applications like OpenOffice than they are Linux desktops. It's a good step
> forward IMO. Internally, they are planning to switch their corporate office
> suite to OpenOffice for fiscal reasons, opting not to renew their license
> agreement with Microsoft (at least for Office).

Hey, whatever works.  Once M$-Office has a real contender the rest is
cake.

> - His entire presentation was done with OpenOffice on SuSE Linux with XD2. This
> is in contrast to the gentleman from Novell that presented to KLUG. :P

Excellent.  It should be noted that the IBM/Ximian/Vmware/SuSe/Novell
shtick not to long ago at the Crowne Plaza was also done on SuSe/XD2.

> - He said they are going to basically let the business markets decide the KDE v.
> Gnome holy war. They are not taking sides. 

Huh;  I thought the business markey had pretty clearly decided (HP, Sun,
IBM, Ximian,....).  Right!  There is Lindows! .... :O  {Ow, such
excellent flame bait}.

They did purchase Ximian after all, and not the Kompany.

> - Lots of the same customer stories of ROI and TCO for switching to Linux.
> Anyone who says Linux is not ready for the enterprise is choosing to be blind.
> Refer them to Cisco, Ford, Met, Merrill Lynch, SAP, etc.....

Yea, these are getting old.  We need something exciting and new.

> - Novell will be open sourcing more projects.

Actually they already have.  Novell Forge has tons of juicy stuff.  I've
poked 'em about getting some of it listed on Freshmeat.net, and the
message got forwarded to somewhere up in the corporate nether-regions;
to ever be seen again?

They provided LDAP support for Mono, and it "just works".  Pretty much
cinched the whole perl/php/python debate for me - all of which have
LDAP, but as a hackish graft - and usually a REALLY slow "hackish graft"
at that. {Note: the perl support is supposed to be WAY faster now than
last time I tried it - when it was SOOOO SLLLLOOOOOWWWWW you could
practically walk down the hall and see the hard drive light on the DSA
blink as it committed the transaction).