But What About NetWare?

As Novell and Attachmate comes closer to completion, one thing is increasingly clear: NetWare code is not long for this world. Does anyone care? Enterprise Networking Planet looks at what’s possibly in store for NetWare users.

The Novell acquisition moves forward. Is anyone wondering what the future of NetWare will be? Is there a future for NetWare?

As Novell and Attachmate continue to perform the ritual mating dance of corporate acquisition, Linux and open source community members are holding their breath, waiting to see what will happen to the SUSE Linux and openSUSE product lines.

In the midst of this, one question seems to be missing: What will happen to NetWare?

To get an idea of where NetWare might be going, it would be a good idea of finding out where the status of the old NetWare product line, now known as Novell’s Open Enterprise Server (OES).

OES, introduced in 2003, is the successor to NetWare, in that it performs all of the same collaborative and network functions that NetWare used to. Instead of these functions working in the operating system layer, however, OES’ functions are performed in the application layer, wrapped around either a SUSE Linux or NetWare kernel. The idea was to make it easy for legacy NetWare users to migrate to OES with a NetWare-kernel version, then ease them into OES with a Linux kernel.

Read the rest of In Midst of Novell Merger, The Last Days of NetWare at Enterprise Networking Planet