Enterprise Unix Roundup: Novell Navigates Linux Ice Floe

We'll admit to a certain fascination with "new Linux company" stories. They're a blend of straightforward "change in direction" combined with a hint of courtship.

Vendors venturing into the Linux market have two constituencies to win over: They must convince enterprises that they're not just chasing open source moonshine over a cliff in a doomed grasp at some trendy mind share, and they have to convince the Linux enthusiasts that they're not going through the motions of getting penguin religion without offering anything back.

IBM set a few examples. It devoted tangible resources to Linux development, contributed to some early success stories with engineering efforts and deployments, and made a point of courting the fractious Linux community. It didn't convince everybody, but don't think for a second that the outrage over SCO's $5 billion suit would be as intense if HP were the defendant.

Novell is the latest entrant in the "new Linux company" category, and the company seems intent on doing things right.

First up, it announced an accelerated timetable for its new Open Enterprise Server (OES), a SUSE/NetWare hybrid designed to push the company into the Linux server space without completely orphaning fans of the NetWare OS/kernel.

An open beta of the server suite is expected in November, followed by a general release in February, a full 10 months ahead of schedule.

We give the company points for finesse. Rather than scaring its loyal NetWare customers witless by declaring the old standby dead (and perhaps prompting further defections to Microsoft), it offered a 50 percent solution, then bumped up the timetable enough to demonstrate commitment to its inevitable conversion to a pure Linux product. If its engineers play their cards right, OES will be indistinguishable from the old NetWare, regardless of what's under the highly regarded management interface.

But not alienating current customers is only half the battle. Novell must also deal with the sensibilities of Linux advocates, who have a recognizable and loud voice in their server closets and data centers.

The fact that the company is allowing acquiree SUSE to remain largely intact as an enthusiast-oriented distribution (we noted the release of SUSE 9.2 last week) shows a certain sensitivity. Red Hat's withdrawal from the hobbyist market cost the company a great deal of good will, and its support of Fedora is viewed as even less than a friendly gesture.

Novell made another good move on the Linux community front this week, when it announced it intends to use its patent portfolio "to defend against potential intellectual property attacks by others on its open source products."

Concern about software patents hasn't entirely taken hold in the mainstream IT community, which is one reason Darl McBride doesn't get hooted out of the room when he calls intellectual property "the new gold" and compares Linux developers to bandits from the Old West. Intellectual property patents are, however, a white-hot concern among open source (and Linux) advocates who, as we've previously discussed, see them as a means to pre-empt the competitive challenges that free software presents.

By framing its software patents as a defensive move, Novell is taking a page out of IBM's playbook and offering a nod to those sensitivities, even as it refuses to swear off a practice that repulses a lot of free software devotees.

If, in fact, there's a sign of a wobble in Novell's courtship of the Linux community, it's probably in the way it seems to have faltered in bringing forward its own desktop product. The company's story about which desktop software it will use to drive the user interface has shifted over time, reflecting a certain confusion about how to deal with twin concentrations of expertise in completely different desktop environments: SUSE is packed with acknowledged KDE experts, but Ximian is run by and staffed with GNOME engineers.

But that's a pretty minor wobble for a company racking up a lot of good will as it makes its way into new territory.

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