Novell may be nearer to Fedora than not.
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| Author | Content |
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| TxtEdMacs Oct 27, 2004 4:10 PM EDT |
Not a good heading, however, the assertions show that the Novell people are not that familiar with the Fedora releases and developer community. That is, the community is still heavily run by Red Hat employees and has met that entities objectives. Early on there were complaints that "community" members outside of RH saw no way to contribute. Moreover, the RH response lacked clarity on how that external community could actively exchange views on features and code going into the releases. Perhaps that has changed, however, from Novell's description of their intent it should not result in too great a difference than what was the early Fedora community. While I viewed the story mostly positive, I have to wonder as to why so much corporate announcements are so divergent from reality. At minimum it implies they do not understand the issues at worse they are disengenuious. I do not subscribe to the latter, at least not yet. |
| cjcox Oct 27, 2004 9:54 PM EDT |
Actually, there's a HUGE difference between SUSE's consumer product and Fedora. SUSE's consumer product line has support... not just willy-nilly community (aka Red Hat engineer's playing with something when not watching their stock options). With SUSE, you get real security updates delivered in a very timely manner. The fact is that SUSE's consumer line has been better supported (historically) than Red Hat's Enterprise line (very true if you go back to Red Hat AS 2.1... which isn't all that old and STILL represents the majority of Red Hat Enterprise out in the field). Novell's statement is that NOTHING has changed with regards to its consumer product line. Prior to Novell's involvement, there wasn't that much difference between SUSE consumer and SUSE Enterprise. All Novell/SUSE is saying is that marketing and support wise, Enterprise is being kicked up a notch (e.g. all you folks using SUSE consumer for business really ought to upgrade to SLES). I'll admit, I used SUSE consumer for all my enterprise deployments. SUSE has to find a way to move people to their SLES line of product. Consider SLES8. It's similar to SuSE 8.1. The update model stinks in comparison to what is in SuSE 8.2 and there are other feature level enhancements in SuSE 8.2. SUSE did some catch up by releasing a few Service Packs to SLES8, but it's kind of bad when you have to release SPs to catch up the consumer line. The update mechanism still stinks in SLES8 btw. I'm hoping for moderate success in that area (initially) without compromising the feature set of SUSE's consumer line. Best bet, start integrating key features of the Novell product stack into SLES. Consumer users won't miss anything and SLES gets its much needed value add. I recommend: 1. Integrate Novell's Directory server into SLES (integrate whatever else as well.. a modestly limited GroupWise, etc.). 2. Throw AutoYast2 away (utter crap) and create a REAL multi-install system that's EASY to use (writing XML by hand is NOT easy.... next thing you know they'll start scripting in Java!). 3. Do whatever they can to preserve their relationship with Sun... or start kicking IBM (interesting turn of events) to start supporting HIGH end machine configurations (8 - 16 way Opterons). IBM is still playing the "Linux is a toy, AIX is for high end" tune. Sun (oddly enough) seems serious about progressing the Opteron platform (SPARC users can interpret that however they want... note there is still a LARGE old guard at Sun that fully believes in a Solaris ONLY world). IBM was the Opteron user... that crown is now being worn by Sun. With that said, IBM has Sanmina wrapped around its finger... look for Sun to use Wistron (not sure if Sun is designing or farming out... it's more of a proprietary design.. possibly more flexible) more and more (early Sun Opteron rack servers were Newisys..now Sanmina designs.. that's a bit too close to IBM for Sun right now). Rumor is that Sun is doing some fancy stuff with Opteron and AMD... possibly more so than IBM at the moment... granted this is "grape vine" communication at best... but if true, IBM needs to kick "it" into high gear (or be prepared to manufacture exciting boards on behalf of Sun!). 4. Figure out what to do with Reiser 4 (perhaps include the repacker feature with SLES). Reiser4 needs help IMHO (oh they'll get there eventually... but right now I'd say a stable Reiser 4 is more than a year off). 5. If SUSE chooses EVMS (likely), make it work.. the good news (good?) is that LVM2 has many problems. Likewise, if Reiser4 is too messy, make JFS or XFS viable enterprise candidates (stable, online growable, lvm friendly). Enterprises need flexible lvm and growable/flexible file systems. More Novell work with Samba would be good as well. 6. Better choices of applications servers, commercial dbs, etc. If JBoss, fine... but make it GOOD. There's still too many ISVs who believe that Red Hat is the ONLY choice for them. Sure... it may work with SUSE, but the ISVs won't support you UNLESS you are running on Red Hat. 7. Fire Novell's marketing person. Their ads are offensive and stupid (targeted at surfer-dude types of folks... embarassing!). I hear that SuSE always laughed at American marketing and so they targeted silly ads to the U.S.A. when they were initially trying the American markets... they must be laughing very hard at Novell's attempts (stupid, stupid, stupid... easily some of the WORST marketing ever). I hope Novell's marketing person reads this... you are a real jerk (I cannot believe you hold a degree in marketing). IMHO.. this is Novell's market to win or lose. The ball is COMPLETELY in their court (not Red Hat!). |
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