I agree. I cut my networking teeth on Netware, going back to the early 90's (not quite as far back as some, but far back). I love Netware and still do. Novell is struggling to bring back it's products to the forefront and to bring new ideas. It lost the marketing war mainly by not fighting. IBM did the same thing early on in the PC era. Neither saw MS as a viable threat. Novell should have known better. Now they are suffering from it. Yet, they are embracing OSS and Linux which is good for everyone. <<JAV>> ---------- Original Message ----------- From: Rick Warner <rwarner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx Sent: 04 Aug 2003 15:06:33 -0700 Subject: Re: Novell buys Ximian > 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 ------- End of Original Message ------- -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
