Bill, First off, my history with Novell and Netware is probably a bit longer than yours. I even had a hand in one release, 2.0a++, aka 2.0b. Inside and outside, I knew the product. Worked with it in the days when it only ran on Novell branded 68K boxes with Arcnet. First a correction. It was Ray Noorda, not Norda. Two o's. Ray did not leave Novewll to found Caldera. He had been gone for a while when Bob Young came on the scene and killed the unified desktop. Once that group left Novell, Ray saw the opportunity and helped to found Caldera, but his departure from Novell and the events that led to Caldera are quite distinct. The handling of the filesystem in Netware is probably still among the best for performance of any alternative. Using all free memory for file cache along with hashing and the elevator seeks really ramps up the performance. At some point in time it would be great if all that stuff got rev'd into some OSS offering. The decline of Netware says more about the marketing power of MS and the associated FUD than with the technological underpinnings of the offerings. That MS has been able to market WinBlows as a server platform against all the superior offerings in the form of Netware, OS/2 and various *NIX platforms reminds me of a mid-80's quote from Rod Canion (co-founder of Compaq) about IBM: "they take C grade products and apply A+ marketing to get an overall B+ grade". Oh so true of MS. To extrapolate on the success, or lack thereof, of BorderManager to the relationship of Novell and OSS and their probability of success if a long stretch. BorderManager entered a market that was replete with similar offerings, all with some tenuous thread tieing them back to squid. It was a market in which almost everyone failed; BorderManager is remarkable in this regard in that it was the only one of the bunch coming from a name brand - and that was a bad thing in the dot com crazed world. I think it is time for folks to take a chill pill, work with vendors like Novell who are willing to try to fund a commercially viable Linux based offering. Linux has benefited greatly from the likes of IBM and RedHat. There have been a lot of good ideas that have died because of lack of financial support during critical periods. I think that it would be more advantageous to try to work with Novell than for folks to be naysayers and to bash them. - rick -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
