Has Open-Xchange Given Up on Novell?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2007-07-16 23:28:00 UTC
Modified: 2007-07-16 23:28:29 UTC

A few weeks ago we mentioned Open-Xchange, which was flirting with Novell again. This came after Novell seemingly betrayed them, along with the rest of the Linux world (follow the links for context). Yesterday I noticed that Open-Xchange had chosen Ubuntu Linux as its platform, not SUSE. There is finally a little more information about this:

Second, and extremely interesting to me, Express Edition runs on Ubuntu. Why does this matter? Well, for one thing it shows Ubuntu's stablity and performance. But on an even more interesting note, take a look at Open-Xchange's management team, and in particular its CTO, Jürgen Geck. You might remember that he was the CTO at Suse....Or check out Open-Xchange's co-founder and EVP of engineering, Martin Kauss. Yep, he was a Suse guy before, too. The list goes on....

Let this inspire you. I am aware of at least two people who explicitly attributed their digital departure from Novell to information posted in this Web site.

More on Open-Xchange: recent review, recent GPL embrace.

Comments

Ian

2007-07-17 03:38:45

Unfortunately, Novell's small business offering is not the best at the moment, based on comments I've read by NetWare based small business veterans. It's not a cohesive package like the NetWare based one. Even then, GroupWise would probably take point for collaboration tools. I've never understood the point of Open Exchange as a best of breed product on Novell servers. Although, for what it's worth, I've never used it so it's hard to compare objectively.

In the end, you can still run OE on Suse if you want. You just can't buy an appliance that runs Suse.
Stephen

2007-07-17 09:44:39

Open-Xchange is a great product but was overkill for Novell (Groupwise, Netmail, HULA etc etc).

The rest though (choosing Ubuntu) looks to be a case of political posturing after a bitter separation - call it divorce retribution if you will.

Certainly, the technical merits of Ubuntu are easy to see, it's a great distribution, as is openSUSE. But the article you've linked to doesn't make enough of a distinction to warrant a winner on any attribute other than personal choice (one of the great things about opensource).

The authors comment "Kubuntu, the distro I've despised until now is my new mate." sums up the articles mediocrity.
Roy Schestowitz

2007-07-17 11:23:53

These are clearly not the most stable and mature distributions for the server. Debian or RHEL would have probably made more sense for Open-Xchange. At work I use KDE on top of Ubuntu (not Kubuntu), so I can say it's decent enough for the desktop. Virtually no downtime/reboots since I had it installed, but KDE acts funny once in a couple of weeks.

Has Open-Xchange Given Up on Novell?

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