12.17.08
10 Novell Predictions for 2009
LET us wait and see how these fare one year from now:
- Mono will become more tightly integrated and prevalent inside GNOME although it will remain possible to exclude (not for the faint-hearted)
- Due to problems of its own, Microsoft will decrease financial support of Novell and maybe even betray it in a small way
- Novell will announce more layoffs
- Tension between Red Hat and Novell will lead to more frequent wars of words
- Microsoft will cite Novell as a reason for patent ‘liabilities’, using examples like Moonlight and Mono that ‘steal’ Microsoft’s ‘innovations’
- Sun or the OpenOffice.org community will go more vocal and vilify Novell for its fork of OpenOffice.org
- At least one top executive — of a level comparable to that of a VP or SVP — will resign
- Novell’s shares will decline to about $2.5 (and the rest of the market follow this trend), which means that its market cap will fall below 1 billion dollars
- Public protests against Novell will become more common
- Novell and Microsoft will announce more collaborations, such as joint work on XPS, HD, and maybe even DRM
Any other guesses? █
Anynomous said,
December 17, 2008 at 2:07 pm
> 3. Novell will announce more layoffs
So you continue your whole year FUD (“proven”, “no doubt”, “say my inside informations”) which proved to be without any substance?
jo Shields said,
December 17, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Who do you think actually keeps go-oo in shape? It’s all the distribution packagers that Sun don’t care about & don’t want to help.
If anything, I’d anticipate either a real fork (not your “patchset means fork” bollocks), or Sun pre-empting it by forming an independent OOo foundation
Diamond Wakizashi said,
December 17, 2008 at 3:02 pm
“Due to problems of its own, Microsoft will decrease financial support of Novell and maybe even betray it in a small way”
I think they will INCREASE Novell support because of their desperation to stop open source from ending their disgusting monopoly. They might even buy Novell.
Roy Schestowitz said,
December 17, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Some Novell employees would be excited by that. They’ve been longing for a job at Microsoft for over 10 years.
twitter said,
December 17, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Predicting the future is difficult because Novell can snap out of it’s death spiral any time they like and become a free software company again. If they don’t Novell will follow the SCO model – everyone but lawyers will be fired. This might not happen in 2009, but it will happen if Novell continues to do as M$ tells them. BN has already shown instances of M$ betraying Novell by stealing Netware market for Windoze “servers”. There will be more of that and fewer conversions to Suse based solutions. Share holders, employees and customers will be totally shafted by this kind of fraud. If they snap out, they can take a lot of M$’s current sever market. Much depends on M$’s own continuing failure. Without change, your predictions look reasonable but M$ is failing hard.
Roy Schestowitz said,
December 17, 2008 at 6:37 pm
But Novell was never a free software company. Now it just happens to be a fee software company. It’s adding fees to libre.
G. Michaels said,
December 17, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Just in case anyone decides to post here (seeing that there’s more activity than usual what with Roy getting the smack down from respected FOSS leaders), people should be wary of this ‘twitter’ person (a.k.a William H. Hill of Baton Rouge, LA). He’s a notorious troll and nymshifter famous mostly for disrupting other communities pretending to be multiple people. He also likes to insult people who disagree with him, or offer proof of his dishonest activities.
Note: writer of this comment adds absolutely nothing but stalking and personal attacks against readers, as documented here.
SubSonica said,
December 18, 2008 at 9:17 am
the smack down from respected FOSS leaders),
Novell lost all respect as “FOSS leader” when they betrayed the very founding principles of Free Software by signing the discriminatory patent protection-racket agreement with Microsoft.
Dan O'Brian said,
December 18, 2008 at 9:24 am
Subsonica: I imagine G. Michaels is referring to Tim O’Reilly who debunked some of Roy’s claims in another article yesterday.
In case you don’t know who Tim O’Reilly is, here’s a hint: he’s not from Novell.
Also, in case you haven’t been following, none of the people debunking Roy’s claims on this site are from Novell.
Roy Schestowitz said,
December 18, 2008 at 9:27 am
Wrong.
Roy Schestowitz said,
December 18, 2008 at 9:31 am
Dan,
Tim was defending OSCON, he wasn’t refuting me.
Dan O'Brian said,
December 18, 2008 at 10:10 am
He was debunking accusations you made about OSCON. Call it what you will, it’s the same thing.
Roy Schestowitz said,
December 18, 2008 at 10:13 am
No, he didn’t. He claimed that Microsoft was not a problem. My claim was that Microsoft agenda will be there in OSCON 2009. He did not refute this.
Zac said,
December 20, 2008 at 11:17 pm
I want Linux to increase in market share significantly. Microsoft has a virtually monopoly on the PC. Therefore, you do not sign a deal with Microsoft to do this. Novell’s management has done this. It is an extremely unwise decision. Novell decision was based on their own company’s financial perspective not for the long term health of linux.
Roy Schestowitz said,
December 21, 2008 at 4:32 am
You mean, on the desktop?
Yes, and if they had any impact on the desktop share, it was negative.