Enterprise Unix Roundup: Is AIX a Big Blue Canary? – page 2

Followup: Novell and the Desktop Iceberg

Just last week, we gave Novell props for successfully navigating many of the tricky issues involved with courting the prickly Linux community. We iterated that if the vendor had stumbled at all, it was likely in the way it glibly promised to fuse GNOME and KDE software for the desktop environment.

We thought this was problematic when we first heard it back in April, if only because "The Desktop Wars" have been a perpetual issue in the Linux community for a solid five years.

As it turns out, Novell made up its mind between the two desktops by deciding to not make up its mind. According to reports, the company plans to offer both GNOME and KDE, and that's probably the safest move a Linux company make.

For those unaccustomed to thinking in terms of more than one GUI for a given operating system, the passion Linux desktop environments generate might seem a little excessive. But both GNOME and KDE touch on a variety of hot-button issues ranging from their foundation languages (GNOME favors C, KDE favors C++) to licensing matters (KDE used a graphical toolkit that wasn't initially licensed with the GPL) to esoterica related to how the respective projects' components communicate among themselves.

For the most part, the Linux community has agreed to disagree on desktops, and it defends that détente by noting that having two major choices for desktop software provides flexibility.

We've discussed why that might be problematic in the past: As nice as choice is, it's also a potential impediment to enterprises seeking to standardize their efforts for purposes of training and support. It can also be confounding for end users who have to navigate the occasional shear that comes from software with two different sets of human interface guidelines.

The obvious response to these objections is that it's up to enterprises to standardize for themselves by removing the choice before deploying to the end user, deciding to live with the potential for chaos, or taking a middle road and offering two options but supporting only one.

One way or another, it's clear Novell walked up to the edge of building a product in which either GNOME or KDE dominated the end-user experience, then realized jumping in either direction would be taking too firm a stand in The Desktop War. Instead, it chose to avoid antagonizing either camp, both of which could be evangelizing its product this time next year.

Chalk another one up to the power of the Linux community, quirks and all.

In Other News

» SCO vs. IBM trundles on, with this week's news being the companies agreed to share information they'd previously held was confidential. SCO wants more source code, IBM says the company is fishing. There's a blow-by-blow up at Groklaw.

» Novell is beefing up its efforts to push Linux out into its channel by offering Novell Certified Linux Professional (NCLP) certification to up to 500 of its Platinum-level VARs. The company's NCLP cert represents an attempt to shift away from the SUSE Linux Certified Professional certification, which Novell plans to phase out.

» Amazon watchers may have noted recently the availability date for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) has slipped to June 30, which is as "first-half 2005" as you can get without being "second-half 2005." In the meantime, developers eager to start working against the upcoming release can sink their teeth into the Tiger Early Start Kit for Developers. At $500 it will keep out all but the most ardent fanboys, but developers who decide to invest in it will get early access to preview releases, access to Apple support engineers, and hardware discounts.

» Linux kernel 2.6.9 came out Tuesday. We tend to advocate conservative uptake of new kernel releases, and we're fairly sure most people who haven't already given the 2.6 series a spin are waiting around for a reason: Nine point releases into this generation of the kernel is probably plenty of time to ensure most of the bad bugs are gone.

» Sun cut prices on StarOffice, the commercial version of OpenOffice, to $39.95 for the downloadable edition, a 50 percent savings on the normal price. The discount is scheduled to end November 7.

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