News Review: Novell takeover of SuSE
SCO started driving the nails into the coffin. Is Novell the graveyard of SuSE? What hope now for the Open Source Dream ?
The shock announcement of Novell's takeover of SuSE (at least, it was a shock to me) throws the entire Linux world into a new perspective.
One of the fears which I expressed when the Linux revolution began to appear was that corporations would begin to "enhance", or "diversify" the Linux offering, and that the cosy little organisations which had hitherto been Linux distros would become either commercial offerings or cease to exist. I fear that my "Tower of Babel" prophesy is proving accurate.
Red Hat have begun to show a profit, but only by concentrating on their Enterprise Server offerings. Nowadays, if you want to buy from this distro, you need to do so with multiple copies. Gone are the days of the hobbiest who could get a copy of the latest and greatest version without leaving a calling card for a salesman to contact him later.
Caldera disappeared - whatever happened to it ? Enough said. They merged with / took over SCO, and - wheels within wheels, one of the big Linux distros suddenly became part of the original Unix crowd.
Then SCO started throwing it's weight around. Why start making life difficult for Linux users ? O.K., maybe, just maybe SCO owns the intellectual property rights for some parts of the Unix code, and maybe, just maybe, someone has done a cut-and-paste to a code module. But you have to make a very good case if this is going to stick. One rumour I heard was that SCO were only following this course of action in order to frighten IBM into taking them over.
Meanwhile, Linux gained prominance in the mind-set of most major hardware vendors (even including Sun, to some extent). They all paid lip-service to the idea of Open Source.
Then along came Novell, who had already acquired the Ximian Desktop, to try to make a play in the Linux world - not as a frebee organisation, but as a commercial play. Notwithstanding that Novell has not always succeeded in managing new Product Lines - such as Borland, WordPerfect, etc. - we now have yet another commercial player. The last of the genuine world-wide Linux distros is dead. I have not included Debian in this list, although maybe I should do so, since the takeover of SuSE arguably gives them an opportunity to do what GPL distros do best - distribute code.
And there is no doubt in my mind that SuSE will change as a result of this takeover. It will become more commercial, and risk losing it's roots.
This may be a good decision for Novell. They can now sell a portfolio of Operating System and Networking Stacks which look an increasingly attractive alternative to Microsoft.
But the days of the old Open Source are over. Back to commercial realities.
Reviewed by Dennis Adams in November 2003